Gallery Newcomers Defy Odds and the Economy

Despite all that’s been written in the past few years about stunning seven-figure prices for single paintings, the business of selling art is generally one that people enter into as much for love as for money. It is not, shall we say, the most recession-proof of enterprises.

So chalk it up to love as much as to folly that new galleries keep opening all over Los Angeles, regardless of the economic downturn. Starting a gallery now is hardly a trendy thing to do, but a matter of dedicated optimism about sharing a point of view with collectors and the public.

Consider, for example, the following newcomers:

CONSTRUCTIVE ATTITUDES: The Ersgard Gallery, which opened this week in Santa Monica, has its roots in the kind of Eureka! experience that occasionally strikes collectors, changing their taste in art dramatically.

For 10 years, owner Britta Ersgard and her husband passed a gallery in their native Sweden that showed contemporary European constructivist art. Not once did they enter--even though they were collectors, and the gallery was on the ground floor of the Stockholm apartment building in which they lived.

Their taste at that time was for figurative art, and constructivist art is anything but. In fact, the rather daunting term--which is somewhat confusingly applied both to nonobjective art emanating from Russia in the 1920s and to a varied and more recent crop of European abstractions--is specifically applied to art that is not figurative and not Expressionist. (In this country, Ersgard said, the term New Abstractions might also be useful.)

Whatever the nomenclature, when the Ersgards finally did set foot in that Swedish gallery, they were dumbstruck. And from then on, over the next year, Ersgard said, they revamped their collection to focus primarily on contemporary constructivism art. When her husband and sons (all of whom are in the film industry) moved to Los Angeles, Ersgard decided to parlay her European contacts into a gallery here.

By way of introduction, the gallery in its opening show is juxtaposing a few older Russian works by Lajos Kassak, Felix del Marle and others with contemporary works by an international slew of artists including Edwina Leapman, Gottfried Honegger, Frank Badur, Richard Paul Lohse, Yuko Shiraishi and Carlos Cruz-Diez.

Elements in the work run the gamut from geometric forms to monochrome color fields, Op-Art features, even number-based systems. But they share a reductive quality that Ersgard said she finds almost meditative, given the average day’s bombardment of stress, information and images.

“Many people experience this art as somewhat cold,” Ersgard said. “But what I find so appealing about it is its calm. It meets me on my own terms, according to my frame of mind--I determine a little what it is going to give me. In a figurative painting, a house is always a house. These works are different every time one interprets them.”

“European Constructivism” through March 2 at the Ersgard Gallery, 1434 4th St., Santa Monica, (213) 319-1681. Open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays and 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Saturdays.

HALF RENEGADE: Also taking the plunge into art dealing is Kevin Wallace, a collector who has just taken over half of the Renegade Gallery in Woodland Hills. Wallace plans to show a quirky mix of figurative and outsider art that he cheerfully refers to as “my strange taste in art.”

Featured through Feb. 1 is a selection of paintings and inscribed wooden wall figures by Howard Finster. A retired Georgia minister who since the 1960s has turned his back yard into a crowded circus of art objects, Finster is one of the best-known of the self-taught outsider artists that have attracted serious art-world attention although they work far removed from the art scene.

Wallace is also showing the work of Mical Stark, a 77-year-old Romanian immigrant who paints primitive Elvis pictures. (In one, Elvis is jamming with Elizabeth Taylor, who is playing a piano that does not touch the floor.) Wallace also represents an itinerant artist named Robert Christy and Thomas Hamilton, whose work runs the gamut from traditional paintings of landscapes off Carmel to drawn ruminations on schizophrenia.

“Everyone I show is a little off-center,” Wallace said. “They either have a strange sense of humor, or they embrace a sensibility that’s a little different.”

Wallace is taking over one wall--basically half--of the narrow space from artist Gary Soszynski, who opened the Renegade Gallery two years ago as a showcase for his pastel paintings and mixed-media pieces. The walls represent unabashedly different sensibilities. “People who like Gary’s work,” Wallace said, “usually don’t know what to make of Howard Finster’s.”

Wallace is also hoping that the gallery will form part of a mini-enclave of culture just off Canoga Avenue. Next door is the Cobalt Cafe, a new coffeehouse that will itself mount changing art shows and hold poetry readings. Both ventures, Wallace said, are based on “the same idea: that the Valley needs something like this. People shouldn’t need to go to the Westside or Hollywood.

“Hopefully we’re right,” he added. “Hopefully the Valley is ready for it.”

Renegade Gallery, 21626 Ventura Blvd., Woodland Hills, (818) 999-0966. Open from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily.

FOR A CAUSE: The Persian Gulf crisis might occupy the political front burner now, but a new gallery in Topanga is trying to keep the flame alive under an issue from yesterday’s news: the situation in Nicaragua.

The Nica (short for Nicaragua) Gallery opened in December at the headquarters of its nonprofit parent organization APSNICA, Artists and Planners in Support of Nicaragua. Since its founding in 1984, APSNICA has provided material and technical support for the construction of housing, schools, water systems and various other facilities for economic development in Nicaragua.

“After the Sandinistas lost the election,” APSNICA director Steve Kerpen said, “there was no news anymore about Nicaragua. The situation there is very critical, very chaotic right now--really almost an anarchy. But there’s real resolve to solve the problems.”

The Nica Gallery is designed to directly benefit the artists represented and to help support APSNICA’s Nicaraguan efforts.

The woodsy space, two miles off Topanga Canyon Boulevard, features colorful primitive and naive paintings (many by artists represented by the Praxis Gallery in Managua). Also shown are ceramics from a cooperative in San Juan de Oriente that are made through a process that involves an outer layer of special clay, polishing with river rocks and decoration with blackberry sap. The gallery also sells rosewood carvings, woven wall hangings and hammocks.

Recognizing that the location is way off the beaten track, the gallery also plans to hold periodic exhibitions in borrowed gallery spaces closer to the art mainstream. On the evening of Jan. 29, for instance, the Nica Gallery will travel to the Sherry Frumkin Gallery in Santa Monica for an evening that will feature art, Andean music and an update on the situation in Nicaragua.

“But I’m also hoping that people will come up here,” Kerpen said. “It’s a nice drive on a weekend.”

Nica Gallery, 1424 Old Topanga Canyon Road, Topanga, (213) 455-1340. Open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays, “Celebration Amid Struggle: Art in Nicaragua,” 7 p.m. Jan. 29 at the Sherry Frumkin Gallery, 1440 9th St., Santa Monica.