Wilshire Center

Back in 1962 hard-edge abstractionist Helen Lundeberg stepped out of the shadows into the harsh glare of bright sunlight. That’s the impression left by this collection of her paintings from 1960 to 1963. The shift was a dramatic and assured change of palette as the artist suddenly replaced the subtleties of dark, almost monochromatic hues with bright, closely related intense colors that radiate from the canvas like a wall in the hot sun.

As accomplished as Lundeberg’s intensely bright architectural paintings are in suggesting deep interior spaces and vast distances cut by shadow and walls, it is the moody power of the darker paintings that are most evocative here. The dim, still interiors and geometric vistas ring with the silence of moonlight walks and solitary musings. This is most strongly felt in paintings like the glowing metallic “Marina” where the direction of invisible brush strokes catches light to slightly alter the underlying color. Such subtlety gives the dark paintings a surprisingly sensuous quality, despite the coolness of deep shadow where color muffles form in near anonymity. (Tobey C. Moss Gallery, 7321 Beverly Blvd., to Nov. 30.)