German Artist Plumbs the Shades of Self

At L.A. Louver Gallery, a small but stunning show of Katharina Sieverding’s work makes it clear why the artist was selected to represent Germany in this summer’s Venice Biennale, and why she will be the subject of a retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam this fall.

Staged in cooperation with Berlin’s Galerie Franck + Schulte as part of the L.A. International, the show features a series of huge photographic self-portraits, colored in tones of red ranging from the bloody to the rusty, which press issues of collective history, personal responsibility and individual identity--the latter caught somewhere between the previous two.

Whereas Germany’s first generation of postwar artists (such as Joseph Beuys, who was Sieverding’s teacher) embraced these questions with a fervor bordering on the operatic, Sieverding’s generation is, logically, more distanced. These images, however, mediate between the poles of emotionalism and intellectualism, and the difficulties of doing precisely that are palpable here, lending the work both its beauty and its edge.

Presented as diptychs, these reddened photographs are near-mirror images of one another, each slightly different from the one with which it is paired, as well as from the others in the group. All look as if they had been somehow irradiated, the artist’s features bathed in an unearthly light that seems diabolical or angelic, depending upon your point of view.

Collectively titled “The Stauffenberg Blocks,” these self-portraits refer to Col. Stauffenberg’s unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944, the year of Sieverding’s birth. Twenty-five years later, in 1969, Sieverding created these images for the first time, only to rework them in 1996. Perhaps it is only a coincidence that 96 is the mirror reflection of 69, but the specters of doubling and reversal it conjures are very real and very apropos.

* L.A. Louver, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through Aug. 16. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Mapping Change: Like all works in progress destined to remain unfinished (think of the late Douglas Huebler’s plan to photograph everyone alive), Kathy Prendergast’s “Capital City Drawings” at Angles Gallery are tinged with melancholy. The young Irish artist has already completed more than 100 of a projected 180, yet five of the drawings are no longer viable because the cities they represent are no longer their country’s capitals: Lagos, Nigeria; Mornoni, the Comoro Islands, etc. And so the project redoubles, perhaps never to catch up with itself or the world again.

Such is the condition of the cartographer, who is by definition devoted to mapping that which no longer exists. The cartographer opposes the chaotic forces of politics, erosion and sprawl, struggling to calcify what is essentially entropic.

Of course, Prendergast is not strictly a cartographer. Her drawings are free of all annotation--street names, highways, landmarks. Instead, she offers highly condensed networks of gossamer lines or loose interweaves of a few strands, depending upon whether the images depict dense medieval cities or the grids of modern town planning.

Looking at these drawings, one quickly loses interest in which city is which, so seductive are the forms themselves. They are unexpectedly but insistently organic: fish with scales, clotted arteries, neural networks, the faint tracery under the surface of leaves. In casting aside the perennial debate between nature and culture, Prendergast engineers something much more subtle: a model testifying to the impossibility of stasis in either sphere.

* Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through Aug. 30. Closed Sunday and Monday.

*

Evolving Art: One reason people become artists is to let others inside their heads. Usually, there is a filtration system involved, in the form of a painting, a photograph, a poem, whatever.

In the case of Kathy Chenoweth and Lynne Berman, whose collaboration at Special K Exhibitions is coyly titled “Tasks, Activities and Outings With Special Demonstrations: A Four-Year Retrospectus,” the filtration system has become purposefully clogged.

Inspirations, rejected scenarios, raw materials, temporary byproducts, holistic objects, after-the-fact regrets and all manner of refractions thereof intermingle, sometimes very charmingly. What this looks like is a dense tangle of ropes and pulleys; drawings, notes and miscellaneous paraphernalia, most of them relating to the artists’ performances; ladders leading somewhere or nowhere; end tables with video monitors screening the artists’ films; masks, buckets, workstations, debris; bubble-gum pink “hoochy koochy mountains” ; a painting to which the two add daily; a posted schedule of the day’s events (12:00: Artists’ Talk; 12:30: Panel Discussion; 1:00: Docent’s Tour; 1:30: Readings) and so on.

There is a logic here somewhere, much of it circling around Chenoweth and Berman’s “Pidma Cycle,” which chronicles the inspirational tale of a “naughty girl”; some of it relating to the “Distratic Center for Information Mismanagement,” which at one time or another produced a bogus product called “crapilene,” and enough of it relating to systems and the problems that perennially plague them to make this register as an elaborate spoof.

Yet, it isn’t really the latter. There’s way too much passion and certainly too much attention to detail here to make this “retrospectus” anything but utterly sincere.

* Special K Exhibitions, 928 N. Fairfax Ave., (213) 656-8694, through Aug. 16. Closed Sunday and Monday.

*

Overload: At Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, an installation of large paintings and drawings by Irish artist Patrick Graham expands upon “The Lark in the Morning,” an exhibition that recently traveled through Ireland. It can only be construed within the context of high drama.

Graham’s work is theatrical, bombastic, borderline histrionic and, occasionally, eloquent--as if in spite of itself. (What, after all, could be more dramatic?)

Figures sketched onto torn or otherwise mangled bits of paper, mysterious diagrams, blueprints of unidentified spaces, specks of glitter, expanses of stucco, yellowed newspapers, strips of Polaroid film, lengths of string and fragments of poetry are shredded, then sutured, stapled, sewn or glued to the back sides of massive expanses of board or canvas.

Interspersed with drips, marks and clotted areas of paint, some of which resemble bird droppings clustered menacingly on the projecting stretcher bars, these fragments refer to traditional Irish symbology as well as the beleaguered nation’s history of famine, emigration, colonialism and war.

If Graham is adept at overload--emotional as well as aesthetic--his work, like that of any number of Neo-Expressionists, is more appealing when it cools down. In those moments, Graham lets the draftsman in him show, and subtle rhyming effects become visible: a collaged sketch of a chalice, for example, echoed in the curvilinear shape of a stain of glue; the word “swan” mirrored by a small drawing of a long-necked creature; a nude whose tensed muscles are reinscribed in the concentric wrinkles of an imperfectly glued sheet of paper.

The latter’s grace is more affecting than any display of excess, no matter how self-assured.

* Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, 357 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 938-5222, through Sept. 20. Closed Sunday and Monday.