Santa Monica

“Artists By Artists,” an exhibition of portraits of artists by artists, sounds promising but fails to deliver much. Pairing off 14 L.A. artists who were instructed to execute portraits of one other, the show is marked by a surprising lack of imagination; most of the participants went for straight-forward likenesses, none of which resonate with the sense of presence characteristic of a great portrait.

Included is an appropriately colorful figurative painting of Sam Francis by Jerry Aistrup, an explosive abstraction by Francis that is labeled as a portrait of Aistrup but looks like standard-issue Sam Francis, and a photo realist rendering of Kent Twitchell by Wes Christiansen. Kathryn Jacobi’s “Portrait of Ruth Snyder as a Baby,” the most inventive piece in the show, is a creepy image of four baby heads floating in a black field, while Richard Wyatt came up with the witty notion of converting Terry Schoonhoven into a set of identical twins. It’s a harmless enough show, but to quote Bob Dylan, nothing was revealed. (Merging One Gallery, 1547 6th St., to May 27).