Art Review

Bold Prints: For those of us willing to accept the notion that anything, in principle, can function as art--an empty room, or even an empty gesture--the current print show at Koplin Gallery is either an anachronism or a reprimand, and maybe a bit of both.

These six Eastern European printmakers have mastered the sort of technical skills that, at least in the United States, have been banished from the gallery world. Yet, if this work lacks the edge we require from what passes today for the avant-garde, it more than makes up for it by reminding us that Conceptual art was never an international mandate, and other kinds of pleasures haven’t become moot in its wake.

Though hardly homogenous, the work of Peiter Klucik, Jan Hisek, Robert Jancovic, Marina Richterova, Vladimir Gazovic and Dusan Polakovic tends to favor the grotesque, with influences ranging from Pieter Brueghel to Max Ernst, from folk art to the scatological cartoons of Tomi Ungerer.

In Klucik’s wryly titled etching, “Tongue Tied,” a thick, somewhat hairy, well-shod but otherwise disembodied tongue poses on a tree branch, like a serpent waiting to strike. In another piece, Klucik conjures a mythological Bratislava where cavalcades of dead creatures gather at the water’s edge, to the delight of gawking spectators.

Klucik fetishizes detail. Hisek, however, is more interested in creating a highly mannered language of form. His ostensibly religious scenes favor a certain amount of pageantry, though the tiny-headed, hyper-elongated figures he depicts are less triumphant than resigned to candle-lit, existentialist despair.

Richterova’s illustrations for “King Lear” and Gazovic’s Renaissance-inspired lithographs are the most conventional works of the lot, while Jancovic’s mezzotints are the most surprising, due to the balance they achieve between referentiality and over-the-top decoration.

Polakovic, however, is committed to the principle of art as spectacle, and if this makes his work somewhat familiar, it is still good entertainment. Best of all is his image of a spaghetti-like edifice stuffed with fish heads, bare breasts and old books. Crowned with a table top/roof decorated with a lone bonsai tree, it is ludicrous and as appealing as anything you’ll see this summer.

* Koplin Gallery, 464 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 657-9843, through Aug. 30. Closed Sunday and Monday.