ART REVIEWS : ‘Gottlieb’ a Fresh, Vital Retrospective

“Adolph Gottlieb: Small Images Spanning Four Decades, 1938-1973” is a gem of an exhibition. This museum-quality survey of 40 paintings on canvas and paper at Manny Silverman Gallery provides much more than a dry, textbook lesson from traditional art history. A pleasure to see, its sometimes eccentric, often radiant pieces by Gottlieb (1903-1974) look surprisingly vital and strangely up-to-date, much fresher than their formal reputations would suggest.

While efficiently charting the Abstract Expressionist’s consistent movement away from figuration and toward increasingly stripped-down abstraction, this show also emphasizes the whimsical inconsistencies in his otherwise highly focused, step-by-step development.

Two small “Unstill Lifes” from 1956 look like missing links between cave painting and graffiti. These out-of-sync predecessors to the rich, frenzied work of the late Jean-Michel Basquiat fuse in-the-street humor to high-brow abstraction.

Two even smaller paintings on postcards from 1963 superimpose Gottlieb’s signature “Bursts”--colorful brush strokes--over a European portrait of a nobleman and a Chinese picture of a horse. They offer a weird pair of precedents for John Baldessari’s colorful dots superimposed over photographic enlargements of B-movie stills.

Snappy graphic designs Gottlieb painted for the cover of Partisan Review in 1969 suggest connections between abstraction and politics that are rarely thought of today. The rest of the exhibition swiftly traces a path from compartmentalized compositions (in the 1940s), through imaginary landscapes that resemble multiple suns setting over the sea (in the 1950s), to yin-yang juxtapositions between foci of expanding and contracting energy (from the 1960s).

Part of the exhibition’s success is due to an important point it makes about size. Its intimate paintings demonstrate that size and scale are not the same thing. A painting’s visual impact and lasting resonance in your mind’s-eye cannot be measured in square inches. Optical drama and intensity of feeling are often condensed into compact formats.

Although this simple fact seems obvious, it’s often forgotten by contemporary artists, especially abstract painters who, drawing the wrong conclusions from Abstract Expressionism, believe that bigger is better and make gigantic, mural-size works that pack less punch than images the size of sketchbook pages.

Gottlieb’s exhibition corrects these misconceptions about Abstract Expressionism, revealing that its achievements have more to do with the vicissitudes of one-on-one intimacy than to the generalities of grandeur. Despite this movement’s daunting historical legitimacy, its most redeeming quality lies in its artists’ willingness to take risks--to abandon what conventions regularly deliver in the hope that something unknown might be discovered.

* Manny Silverman Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive, West Hollywood, (310) 659 - 8256, through June 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

*

Academic: It’s more interesting to think about the ideas behind Trudie Reiss’ paintings than it is to actually look at them. Her cartoonish illustrations show modernistic buildings whose corridors and courtyards are populated by thumbprint-like smudges, which she has endowed with stick-figure legs but no other features.

Reiss’ thin, academic pictures at TRI Gallery are less compelling than the theoretical concepts on which they’re based. Notions about alienation, facelessness and the loss of individuality that often accompany massive social movements receive bland, superficial treatment by these limpid oils-on-canvas.

Reiss’ indistinguishable figures are incapable of expressions or interactions beyond those suggested by immediate physical activity. Although they loiter, run, copulate and urinate on each other, their exaggerated antics lack emotional impact. It’s difficult to have much sympathy for smudges of paint that look more like punctuation marks than people.

As if Reiss is herself unconvinced that these paintings successfully convey her intentions, she has augmented her exhibition with a looped audiotape and an opening night performance. The tape consists of an old woman’s irksome voice recounting memories of an empty, disappointing life. The show’s title, “Looking Back in Anger,” derives from the bitterness that fuels this character’s rambling monologue.

The opening night performance was even more juvenile in its desperate, faked Angst . Unknown to those in attendance, Reiss had hired an actress to mingle with the crowd before stepping up to a painting--strategically covered with a sheet of clear vinyl--dashing her glass of red wine on it, blurting a derogatory comment about the artist and striding out the door.

If Reiss didn’t try to maintain such start-to-finish control over her art, it might do more than dutifully illustrate preconceived ideas. This is particularly ironic, given that a central theme of her work is the negative effects of relentless, overbearing control.

* TRI Gallery, 6365 Yucca St., Hollywood, (213) 469-6686, through Sunday.

*

Energetic: A handsome exhibition of abstract drawings by Tony DeLap at Mark Moore Gallery unpacks a lot of the elegant visual energy that the artist manages to cram into his impeccably crafted, three-dimensional wall-works. Wrapping around three of the gallery’s walls, 46 predominantly black-and-white, page-size works on paper from the past 17 years hang at various angles, as if each is a musical note that’s dancing to a score formed by the ensemble.

In contrast to DeLap’s pristine shaped-paintings, from which every trace of the artist’s hand has been eliminated, his drawings consist entirely of erasures, adjustments and notational markings. Smaller pieces of paper have been cut, pasted and taped onto larger sheets, then both have been painted with gouache, highlighted with colored pencil and shaded with graphite.

As a result, DeLap’s drawings appear to be ongoing improvisations, endlessly changing variations on a limited yet flexible vocabulary of geometric forms. His ad-hoc collages reveal the casual, off-handed gracefulness that is the basis of his more refined and precise wall-works, which share the same animated weightlessness that energizes his works on paper.

* Mark Moore Gallery, 2032-A Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-3031, through May 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.