Works by a Swedish Artist Who Put the Potato Into Glass Making

In 1953, a young Swedish sculptor stunned the venerable Boda glassworks by embedding potatoes in the still slightly molten crystal he was working on. As the tubers cooked and disintegrated, they let off gas that left the glass riddled with tiny bubbles rather than flawlessly clear.

This was heresy, according to the Boda factory’s old-time glass blowers, at least one of whom walked off the job in protest.

This was experimental genius, according to the subsequent history of Scandinavian design, which has judged Erik Hoglund one of its most consistently innovative artists working in glass. Hoglund also is a sculptor in bronze, as well as a painter.

“He’s Scandinavia’s Picasso,” said Lief Aarestrup, owner of Lief, a Scandinavian design and antiques emporium on Melrose Avenue. Through Nov. 23, the store’s back-room gallery is featuring a show of 40 recent glass sculptures by Hoglund.

“If you take other glass masters, they’re doing work with more or less the same feeling--with Hoglund, there are tremendous contrasts,” Aarestrup said. “He plays .”

Indeed, over the years, Hoglund has experimented not just with bubbles, but with rustic folk forms, with huge glass murals--and with color. In recent works such as those on view at Lief, strong opaque colors are often suspended in or overlaid on clear crystal. In some pieces, the colors gaily depict faces. In others, they are intertwined with a double helix theme--an interplay that derives from Hoglund’s fascination with the genetic material DNA, his wife, Ingrid, said.

Hoglund, 57, was supposed to travel here for the show--his first in Los Angeles. But he is in a Stockholm hospital, suffering from one more set of complications from the diabetes that struck him when he was 12 and that made the 1980s a difficult decade for him: He underwent two eye operations and a kidney transplant.

“The sicker he got, the stronger his colors grew,” his wife said. “He works against his disease. Erik is always, always drawing--he works constantly, even in the hospital.”

And he continues to experiment. Ingrid Hoglund said she never knows what new creations her husband will come home with after a stint at Strombergshyttan, the small glassworks with which he is affiliated.

“It’s like Christmas,” she said, “every time he returns.”

Erik Hoglund glass sculpture through Nov. 23 at Lief, 8264 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles. (213) 658-1100. Open 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday.

EXIT RIGHT: For the third time in two years, New York artist Anna Bialobroda has brought her unusual take on the movies to Los Angeles--this time, to the art galleries at Cal State Northridge.

In her paintings, Bialobroda depicts the interiors of movie houses, often with black and white scenes playing to an empty audience; slices of movie-scale faces; and the unsung exit sign.

“What fascinated me about the movie theater,” said the Polish-born Bialobroda, who was taking a break from speaking to a CSUN class called Art and Media, “is that it’s this huge, monumental space, and the only function of it is to sit and look. I’ve used it to investigate how we know what we know, how we see what we see--and how we see ourselves today.”

She has also used it to take a look at painting. “I chose the movie theater and the projected image--since it’s artifice--as a parallel to painting,” Bialobroda said.

In looking at how we see, for instance, Bialobroda considered the cinema’s role in changing how we experience detail, she said. “Detail was very intimate before,” she said. “But detail in a projected image becomes monumental, horrific--so blown apart that it becomes abstract.”

Bialobroda’s recent paintings--which feature fragments of monumental faces, framed as though glimpsed through a half-open theater door--evolved as a means of assessing the self and how it is regarded, she said. For this series, she drew upon what she sees as the “whole history of the gaze--how one engages the viewer, how one interacts with the viewer. In this instance I think of the viewer as being as much observed and judged as the painting is.”

And what of the exit signs that she has rendered over and over with painterly dashes of color--and that are arrayed near a real exit sign above a gallery door? In a movie theater, Bialobroda said, “The exit sign is the only point indicating reality behind the artifice.”

For her, the exit sign also represents transition--”It’s about going from one place to another”--in a transitional time at a century’s end. And, she said, the exit sign represents an inescapable modern-day imperative. “We take it so much for granted,” Bialobroda said. “But it’s a directive that is ubiquitous in our lives.”

Anna Bialobroda through Dec. 1 at the art galleries of Cal State Northridge, 18111 Nordhoff St., Northridge. (818) 885-2226. Open noon to 4 p.m. Monday and Saturday, and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday.

WATERWORKS: The Valley Watercolor Society was formed in the late 1970s, when a small group of artists and art teachers began meeting at one another’s houses to discuss their work. It has grown into an organization of about 200 members, with monthly meetings that include demonstrations by guest artists--and now, a juried member’s exhibition.

“Tradition & Beyond” is a show of 69 works by Valley Watercolor Society members, on view at the Lankershim Arts Center through Nov. 30. The paintings range from traditional landscapes to conceptual and abstract pieces, exhibition Chairman Steve Walters said.

For the last eight years, Walters said, the society has held member shows that have been open to all--exhibitions generally shown in March at the Sumitomo Bank building on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks. But this year, a second show has been added, with submissions selected and judged by Pasadena watercolorist Jae Carmichael, a past president of the National Watercolor Society.

Walters said that as far as he knows the Valley Watercolor Society is the only organization in the Los Angeles area devoted exclusively to watercolor and water media work--that is, not just to traditional watercolor (where the paint is applied transparently onto paper), but also to opaque and other applications of water-based paint.

“This organization is not one of purists,” Walters said. “We encourage experimentation in all directions.”

But the watercolor paint seems to exert a unifying appeal. “There’s a certain spontaneity, an unpredictable nature to watercolor,” he said. “It’s a media where you have control, but it takes over a little bit itself. You have to work in harmony with it.”

“Tradition & Beyond,” Valley Watercolor Society member exhibition, through Nov. 30 at the Lankershim Arts Center (a division of the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department), 5108 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. (818) 989-8066. Open 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday.