Wilshire Center

If the proliferation of summer group shows provides an opportunity to see a smattering of art without having to hit a lot of galleries, they also mean seeing work hung together for convenience rather than rhyme or reason. “Works on Paper” is that kind of capricious grouping.

Standouts in the gathering are Steve Heino’s subdued but luscious collage paintings on translucent paper and Lee Kaplan’s multipanel photographs that lift bits from De Chirico and magazine ads for an ambiguous surrealistic conceptual piece entitled “Gesture.” Also worth a prolonged pause is the haunting, pasty-faced specter with green hands surrounded by red poppies in “Valdez Morte” painted by Mel Rubin, and the fading figure with the still real suit and red hot chair in Alison Saar’s intriguing “Invisible Man.”

Prints by artists of national and international reputation in the adjoining gallery are pretty much what you’d expect. The quality is high but the work tends to ignore the present in favor of the better known imagery of the past. An exception is a huge, wildly entertaining Frank Stella 1989 print that has all the energy of his recent work. It makes a snappy assertion of ongoing creative fervor next to the small, crayon colored geometry of an earlier lithograph displayed nearby. (Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., to Aug. 26.)