Hold the Anchovies, Nude Art : Display: After customer complaints, an artist’s sculptural exhibit at an Irvine pizza restaurant is likely to go.

When Thomas Davis walked into Z Pizza and saw plaster torsos of nude women, one split in two with a bolt in her wrist and one festooned with pictures of nude women, he penned a note to the artist:

“You are a very sick person. I can no longer bring my grandchildren in here for pizza.”

Eliciting a response, even a negative one, was exactly what the artist wanted from her first public exhibit. But Davis’ response and others like it have prompted restaurant owner Susie Megroz to reconsider the display.

Z Pizza, across the street from UC Irvine, regularly displays the works of new artists. But this is the first controversial exhibit, Megroz said.

“Every day we have people saying something about it,” she said. “We have some people saying they love it. But all the people say they don’t want their children to see it.”

Since about 40% of her customers are local families, Megroz said, she will probably remove the exhibit before its six-week run ends.

The display, by San Clemente artist Lilli Muller, was so disturbing that Davis, 67, and his wife, Anne, 64, told Z Pizza employees they would not return until it was gone. The artwork would be fine if it were in a gallery or across the street at UCI, said Anne Davis. “But this is a part of the family-oriented Town Center.”

On their visit last month, they didn’t notice the art until they had begun eating with their 7-year-old grandson and 4-year-old granddaughter, she said. She was at a loss to explain one of the explicit pieces to her grandson when he asked.

“I’m trying to think of an explanation, and I couldn’t,” Anne Davis said. “It made me very uncomfortable. Who would have thought I would have to explain this in a family-type restaurant?”

The most controversial work expresses the theme of domestic violence, Megroz said. It features a red torso of a man with raised, well-muscled arms. His hands carry realistic phallic missiles, which have offended some customers, she said.

The torso is mounted on a bull’s-eye covered with newspaper clippings about battered women. The piece is titled “An Angry Man is Like a Blind Bull,” said Muller, 33. The man is mounted on a bull’s-eye to illustrate that the true target of his anger is himself, she said.

Ron Ritner, 32, a regular Z Pizza customer and an architectural designer from Newport Beach, said that the art “is definitely offensive” but not enough to keep him away.

“I think it’s great they display artwork here,” Ritner said. “But I think they went a little far out on a limb this time.”

“It’s pretty unappetizing,” Susie Lunsford, a 20-year-old English major, said as she sat beneath a nude plaster cast. “It belongs in an art show, not a place where you eat.”

The display is the first of a three-part series of works with a single theme of self-examination and self-discovery, Muller said.

Much of her artwork involves issues of female violence, and most of it involves nudity.

“It gets you right to the core,” Muller said. “I want to cut through the (false layers) and get right to the core of the person. And I think there’s nothing better than stripping it down to the naked truth.”

The images are meant to shock, even if they offend, Muller said.

“It takes so much for people nowadays, especially in this country and especially in Southern California, to respond to anything,” she said. “They are so numb, they don’t respond to anything. People are so much into their soaps, their Monday Night Football and their Budweiser beer.”

Muller said she hopes to goad.

“It’s all an artist can ask for,” she said. “A split-second to get them to think.”