Wilshire Center

In the ‘60s at Britain’s Royal College, Derek Boshier and classmates like David Hockney founded English Pop. Hockney took the fad to the bank, while the ruminative wanderer Boshier found the label constricting and made tracks for India. Back in Britain, he gave up painting entirely for the next decade, making photographs, film and collaborative projects with heavy political overtones. In the late ‘70s a Texas university offered Boshier a teaching post and studio. Under the influence of the Neo-Ex wave, Boshier took up brush and paint again to create the crudely lyrical, politically tinged figuration he shows here.

Painted in screaming, from-the-tube yellows and reds, with figurative detail smudged on in sooty blacks, Boshier paints heavy curtains gathered at the edges of canvases as if the picture frame were a window sill. In “Snow,” the cumbersome curtains whose folds are a caricature of real drapery part to expose an utterly barren winterscape. To get the subtle political drift, you have to notice that the playful pattern stencilled all over the curtain is a repeating map of the United States. In “Black Robes, White Robes and Color Television,” smudged figures of robed Ku Klux Klansmen melt into images of up-standing robed judges. In the political wasteland that Boshier portrays, one dogma is no different from the next and only the power of the media determines the hero from the villain. This is disturbing, broody but strangely beautiful work.

Michael Tidmus is best known for video works that flashed the names of dead AIDS victims over the smiling faces of Reagan and Bush. Here he shows silver prints embedded in small wood panels under thick layers of yellowish varnish. The tiny works have the appearance of antique plaques jaundiced and faded by time. Over the whole surface of the imagery, Tidmus places regular rows of stud-like protrusions, so that you are constantly struggling to make sense of disturbing bits of interrupted visual information. Faded images of a thorned and bleeding Christ, a terrifying hooded man brandishing a whip, and bits of classical statuary serve up a gnawing brew of eroticism, violence, passion and spiritual love. (Fahey/Klein Gallery, 148 N. La Brea Ave., to Feb. 24.)