Wilshire Center

The crossover between modernist painting and early photography can clearly be seen in this show of European experimental photography from 1920 to 1945. Black-and-white photographs by relatively unknown European photographers Xanti Schawinsky, Luigi Veronesi, Frantisek Drtikol and a few others make use of a painterly vocabulary of abstraction and surrealism that seems at once alien and refreshing in the usually representational medium of photography. And considering the current trendiness of appropriation and deconstruction many of these experiments (which are at heart a minimalist analysis of light as material/as subject) also feel surprisingly contemporary.

Painter and Bauhaus designer Schawinsky makes fragmented images that have become backbone commercial, graphic-art fodder blunting the impact of their cunning investigation of form and seeing. But Veronesi’s transparent, ethereal images that bounce light off and through strange industrial pieces of plastic or delicate pieces of ribbon still look good.

Black and white stills from Russian avant-garde films are in an adjoining gallery. Bits and pieces gleaned from unknown films, they stand on their own with real force. Most striking is Nikolai Ochlopkov’s “Prodannyj Apetit (Money Makes The Mare Go),” a Fellini-esque close-up of a sweating fat man’s head sizzling in a steam cabinet. More haunting are three stills from the Eisenstein and Tisse film “Stachka (Strike),” which superimpose heads of birds and beasts over human faces for a stark composite view of predators. (G. Ray Hawkins Gallery, 7224 Melrose Ave., to Sept. 1.)