ART NOTES : Galleries Gear Up for Biennial II

Bigger, better and more generously financed than its 1993 predecessor, the second Los Angeles International Biennial Invitational is shaping up as a major summer event.

The collaborative venture is expected to bring exhibitions from foreign countries to 50 local galleries July 12-Aug. 20.

France, Switzerland, Korea, Brazil, Germany, Mexico, Canada, Japan, Russia, Colombia and Belgium are among countries that will be represented, according to William Turner, president of the Santa Monica/Venice Art Dealers Assn., which is producing the event.

Exhibitions will be staged in a citywide array of galleries including Angles, Patricia Faure and Rosamund Felsen in Santa Monica; Margo Leavin, Tom Solomon and Louis Stern in West Hollywood; Ace in the Mid-Wilshire District, and Cirrus downtown.

“I think the high level of participation reflects the fact that people are experimenting with new ways to get information out about what they are doing,” Turner said.

And unlike art fairs, which provide visiting art dealers with less-than-ideal viewing conditions for a short period of time--generally at a stiff cost--the L.A. International will offer free six-week exhibitions in amenable gallery settings, he said.

Festivities will begin with an evening reception July 12 at Santa Monica Museum of Art. Each of the following three nights will feature a group of gallery receptions in a different part of town. Plans are also in the works for a series of related events, including museum-hosted panel discussions and gallery tours.

Absolut Vodka will be the International’s primary sponsor. Christie’s and Sotheby’s auction houses also will provide financial support, Turner said, and talks are under way with potential backers. Sponsors’ donations will pay for publication of a catalogue and help to defray expenses.

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P.S. HE LOVED YOU: The Palm Springs Desert Museum has received a bequest of 132 works of contemporary American art, along with $1.5 million to initiate a capital campaign to build a 20,000-square-foot addition to the museum, from the late interior designer and philanthropist Steve Chase.

The new structure, the Steve Chase Art Wing, will house galleries for the museum’s permanent collection which Chase helped design. An education center, including four classrooms and an 88-seat theater, were added to the plan after his death. The expansion will increase the museum’s size to 103,000 square feet. Construction is scheduled to begin May 1 and be completed next spring.

Chase, who was affiliated with the interior design firm Arthur Elrod Associates in Palm Springs during the 1960s and 1970s, formed his own design company in 1980. While advising clients on art acquisitions, he built a personal collection, including paintings, sculpture and works on paper by New York artists John Chamberlain, Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella.

Chase’s particular fondness for color-field painting is exemplified by Helen Frankenthaler’s “Carousel”--a 17-foot-wide predominantly red canvas painted in 1979.

Among numerous pieces by California artists, the highlight is a monumental (10-by-8-foot) splashy grid painted by Sam Francis in 1977. A sampling of 40 works from the Chase donation is on view at the museum through April 30.

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FREEWAY SHOTS: Photographer Jeff Gates, who documented the Century Freeway corridor and the long-delayed project’s effect on the neighborhood in 1982-83, has re-emerged in the Southland with two exhibitions near the now-complete freeway. Photographs from his original portfolio, “In Our Path,” and more recent images that portray changes resulting from the construction are on view at the Downey Museum of Art (through April 24) and at El Camino Community College’s Art Gallery (through April 7).

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THE VIEW FROM OUTSIDE: New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art has relaxed its customary nationalistic approach and invited three European museum directors to “explore artistic crosscurrents between the two continents and attempt to define aspects of the unique character of American art” in a series of exhibitions drawn from the Whitney’s permanent collection and holdings of the guest curators’ institutions.

“Views From Abroad,” June 29-Oct. 1, will begin with a show organized by Rudi Fuchs, director of Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. Fuchs plans to draw parallels between American abstraction and realism.

Jean-Christophe Ammann, director of the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt, will address affinities between American and European artists after World War I in a show scheduled to open in August, 1996. The following year, Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Gallery in London, will present the final exhibition.