Wilshire Center

Fragments of classic architecture and sculpture rendered in simple, thick black line then collaged onto pieces of paper give Judy Rifka’s drawings the feeling of a tourist’s scrapbook. It’s strange to see historic Doric columns and heads of Greek goddesses flattened out, cut up and reassembled like meaningless visual fodder for abstracted Cubist paintings. The resulting image, however, gives unity to diverse survey of art historical concerns.

Rifka’s gray-and-white paintings take a similar approach to art history but are more dense. Having translated classic forms into abstract shapes in the drawings, she then mixes up the flat forms in the paintings. Layering negative and positive shapes into a densely stacked but flat space, the works have the graphic punch and spontaneity of a spilled tray of paper cut outs.

Clytie Alexander’s watercolor landscapes and seascapes are simply bright dual explosions of color. In the intensity of the wet-into-wet pigment, ballooning without form, can be projected the changing colors of the seasons or the watery reflections of an unseen sunset. As abstract notations of her trips to Canada and the Atlantic, they are lightweight, romantic bits of color-coded memory. (Saxon-Lee Gallery, 7525 Beverly Blvd., to May 13.)