Abstract Painter Opens Door to Meeting of Art, Science

Los Angeles art has a surprisingly long and persistent history of fascination with science and technology. If that sounds a bit dry, it is.

Artists, however, being imaginative, tend to use science as a door to the magic of metaphysics. Evidence is provided by the Long Beach Museum of Art exhibition “Particles and Waves: Bettina Brendel.”

The artist was born in Germany in 1922. Her father was a poet in the Expressionist tradition. She was interested in science but thought she might infuse it with some of the harmonics of verse. After formal art studies in Hamburg and exhibitions with an early group of Munich abstractionists in the 1950s, Brendel married, emigrated to New York, had a daughter and became a U.S. citizen.

In 1955, she settled in L.A. for what would be a decade. Her work was exhibited by the Esther Robles and Comara galleries on the old La Cienega gallery row. In 1966, she returned to New York to study the history and theory of physics at the New School for Social Research.

She sojourned to Munich and met with Werner Heisenberg, the Nobel laureate and father of the uncertainty principle in subatomic physics. He encouraged her artistic investigations. Brendel returned to L.A. in 1972.

Hers is not the only work to suggest that art and science are somewhat uneasy bedfellows. Art makes science look a little spacey. Science makes art appear a trifle over-engineered. Both things are true of Brendel’s work, but it’s still pretty interesting, both intrinsically and for the kinds of issues it raises.

As if you hadn’t guessed, Brendel is an abstract painter and printmaker. It will also come as no surprise to learn that she now works with a computer, although, as far I could tell, the results look about the same as when she didn’t.

The earliest of 27 works on view is dated 1957, but the ensemble concentrates chronologically toward the present. Her stock-in-trade motifs are circles that sometimes take on an organic wiggle and nest into one another, suggesting either galactic nebulae or particulate matter invisible to even the most powerful microscope. It’s the old cycle of macrocosm-into-microcosm still at work.

Often all this is rendered against a rickrack of short, colored lines. Sometimes they make up the whole field, as in her rather Jackson Pollock-like “Ionization.” More often, they form into bands. In “Lens Focus,” for example, a circle is imposed over alternating horizontals of yellow and white. Crossing the circle, the white bits turn black. When one stares at the composition, the circle at first appears in front of the background and three-dimensional, then it does a flip-flop and appears to be behind the bands and flat.

In short, if subatomic physics are in this work, they can only be present metaphorically because the real science that’s running this show is, by necessity, optics. We already know about optics-as-art from a range of people, from Victor Vasarely to Bridget Riley and the Color-Field Minimalists.

This is not to denigrate Brendel’s work. It’s simply to make a distinction between art’s ability to actually render a science that’s by definition invisible and art’s aptitude for evoking a convincing fantasy of what it might look or feel like.

Along those lines, Brendel’s most imaginatively appealing works include the decoratively explosive “Expanding World” and her digital print “Anechoic Space.” It does a good job of calling forth the sensation of Luke Skywalker flying the spatial gantlet in “Star Wars.”

In terms of L.A. art’s historic preoccupation with science and technology, Brendel’s art reminds us of a significant brace of local masters. Her work brings to mind artists as disparate as June Wayne and Robert Irwin. Both of them have been actively interested in scientific investigation.

Brendel also puts one in mind of Lee Mullican and Ed Moses. Neither of them is noted for scientific curiosity. They rather share interest in Zen, American Indian religions and hallucinogens. Thus, the common ground that really unites all of them is using craft--the technology of art--to open and control the doors of spiritual perception.

The curator of the Brendel exhibition was LBMA registrar Laela Weisbaum.

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* Long Beach Museum of Art, 2300 E. Ocean Blvd., through April 12, closed Mondays and Tuesdays, (562) 439-2119.