Self-Portrait

For the Orlando Gallery in Sherman Oaks, life continues at 40, which is a fairly remarkable milestone for an art gallery in Los Angeles, let alone one on this side of the hill. The Valley, over the years, has proven its cultural worth and intent and bucked stereotypes. A lively demographic of creative people lives, works, eats and thinks here. But the plain fact is that the gallery scene here tends to eat its young.

Galleries have come and gone, but Orlando has prevailed and has now proudly reached its 40th anniversary. Under the circumstances, who can fault it for a self-reflective celebration?

In a sense, the show assembled in this space for May is the self-portrait of a venerable gallery, in terms of pieces from current and past artists associated with it. There are also plenty of images here of the current keepers of the flame, amicable co-founder Bob Gino and Don Grant, nephew of the gallery’s other founder, the late Phil Orlando.

Orlando himself can be seen in the window along Ventura Boulevard, in a portrait by Don Lagerberg. Orlando’s face is sharply etched in realist mode, while the canvas grows increasingly unfinished, radiating outward from Orlando as he gazes off intensely in contemplation. Inside the gallery proper, Lagerberg is also represented by “The Float,” a contrastingly simple painting of a buoy in water, elevating the commonplace.

The familiar bespectacled presence of Gino pops up like a fitting recurring motif in the gallery, in portraits by Jenik Cook, Charles Mattenberger, Mario Semere and Jo. Blabber, who uses a comfortably loose hand in portraying Gino and Grant, the odd couple found in this space on any business day.

Brian Mark brought his own wry notion for the show, with his painting “For Forty Years + Forty Nights,” a painting sporting 40 female nudes of various shapes and sizes. Lew Ott’s seemingly nonrepresentational painting, dating to 1960, is less abstract than it appears once you learn the title: “Still Life With a Sewing Machine.”

Bob Haas’ “Landscape” is a conceptual diptych of sorts, with a vertical traditional landscape next to a white panel marked with a circle--the skeletal beginnings of the painter’s art. Both panels contain tiny diamonds, jewels in the rough. Jesse Bunch’s “The Dinosaurs” brings more kitsch than paleontology to the easel, depicting creatures echoed by plastic dinos glued onto the frame.

In the sculptural corner, Merrilyn Duzy’s “Sylvia Sleigh” pulls off a neat illusionistic trick, depicting a dancer’s sensuous form with wax, twine and the found object of a writhing, porous tree limb. The fantasy vehicle that is Vida Hackman’s assemblage “Dinghy for Squire Raven’s Boat” is, at once, funky and graceful.

Humble little paintings leap up for attention in the back gallery. Chris Mooradian’s enigmatic landscape, graced with a mystical air, has a strength belying its modest size. Diana Stewart’s painterly technique of mottled realism lends proper ambiguity and tension to “Waiting,” with its suspended narrative, a la Eric Fischl, concerning a bedroom, a telephone and a glimpse of a figure disappearing around a corner.

In 1958, when Orlando and Gino opened their first Ventura Boulevard space just up the road in Encino, they found a mad crush of artists eager to be shown. “There was such an outpouring of young artists here,” Gino said, “we had two shows a month.”

Since then, there has never been a lack of art to show.

In the anniversary show, artist Mary Monge pulls back to offer a portrait of the gallery itself, a view of the Orlando Gallery from the street. She deploys a deceptively straightforward approach, inserting a parking meter that stands sentry in the foreground, almost as a kind of reality check.

In this plain watercolor image lies the essence of the Orlando experience. It’s a space standing proudly for art in the midst of commerce on the boulevard, fending off the cultural apathy and the ticking clocks of parking meters and landlords.

BE THERE

40th Anniversary Exhibition, through May 30 at the Orlando Gallery, 14553 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks. 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Tues.-Sat.; (818) 789-6012.