Crucifixion: ‘Most Painted Image’ Is Focus of Timely Exhibition With Political Twist

As food for thought to complement the Easter eggs and religious ritual of the holiday season, LAART’s Installations One gallery in Encino is presenting “Crucifixion/Crucifiction.” Sixty-three member artists have produced widely varied work for the show, which opened on Good Friday.

“The crucifixion is probably the most painted image in Western art history--and I think every artist should do at least one,” said Mickey Kaplan, founder of LAART and curator of the exhibit.

The art on view ranges from straightforwardly religious works to more socially symbolic and satiric pieces. One even braves the controversy that surrounds U. S. Sen. Jesse Helms’ campaign against religiously and sexually offensive art.

In a sculpture called “Beer Mouse,” artist Forrest Meader has immersed an iconic Mickey Mouse figure in a large jar of flat beer--an allusion to Andres Serrano’s controversial photograph “Piss Christ” in which a crucifix was placed in a container of the artist’s urine. Other artists have extended the concept of crucifixion to the Holocaust, to racial lynchings and, for that matter, to abstract painting.

“Crucifixion/Crucifiction” through April 26 at Installations One, 15821 Ventura Blvd. (ground floor), Encino. (818) 981-9422. Open 11:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays.

VENICE VENUE: Who says that every new or relocating gallery has to head for Santa Monica? On April 24, the Marquardt Gallery will open in Venice with a show of works by John Serl, a 97-year-old painter who has been heralded as an important figure among so-called “outsider artists”--the self-taught or naif artists who develop far from art schools and the art scene and who are drawing increased attention as heirs to the folk art tradition.

The Marquardt Gallery plans to specialize in the works of such autodidact masters, sometimes collaborating with the Cavin & Morris Gallery in New York and the Janet Fleisher Gallery in Philadelphia.

“There’s a genuineness to this work. It hasn’t been channeled and directed and refined, but is still in its pure--and somewhat raw--form,” said Kathleen Marquardt, who is founding the gallery with her husband, Bruce, a management consultant whose clients have included the Rainforest Foundation.

Also within the gallery’s purview will be contemporary painting from such places as Haiti and Morocco, ethnographic art from Africa and elsewhere, and work that otherwise relates to what is sometimes termed “the spiritual in art.”

The gallery is in the artsy enclave of Market Street’s beach block, across from one branch of L.A. Louver and next to the restaurant 72 Market Street and the Market Street Gallery.

“We’re excited that they’ll be down the street--and we’re hoping very soon that we’ll have wonderful co-op parking,” said Rebecca Rutledge, director of the Market Street Gallery, which opened last year.

Marquardt Gallery, 76 Market St., Venice. (213) 399-2570. Open from noon to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays and noon to 10 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays.

BACKROOM AESTHETICS: Tucked away at the back of Lief, a new Scandinavian furniture and design emporium on Melrose Avenue, is a boxy little white gallery with an exhibition schedule as ambitious as many a contemporary art space. Shows--many imported from the Viking north--of cutting edge and often prize-winning Finnish, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian design (and, more occasionally, of fine art) are mounted here, changing every three weeks.

Included in the present exhibition, on view until Thursday, are a bevy of chairs and an unusual table crafted by Rudi Merz, a Swiss-born sculptor who works in Finland.

Exceedingly simple in form, the subtly colored chairs are hand-hewn of birch, each slightly humped back emblazoned with a carved tree or rain-like crosshatching. Intersecting on the table top are tiny tracks that mutely tell the apparently peaceful story of a human crossing paths with a rabbit, as if in the quiet wilds of the snowy north.

The whole lot, which is shown courtesy of the Amos Ammundsen Museum in Finland, speaks volumes about the Scandinavian reverence for nature.

Lief, 8264 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles. (213) 658-1100. Open from 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays.