Burkhardt Created His Own Categories

“Casting a Shadow,” a survey of paintings, drawings and prints by Hans Burkhardt, could just as easily have been titled “Filling a Void.” The show, at Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, is one of dozens in galleries around town timed to complement the exhibition “Sunshine & Noir: Art in L.A. 1960-1997,” now at the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum. Burkhardt (1904-1994) is not represented in that show, just as he has largely been omitted from canonical writings on Abstract Expressionism. He’s not an easy fit, but neither is his art of tremendous passion and texture easily dismissed.

Born in Basel, Switzerland, Burkhardt emigrated to New York in 1924, where he studied under Gorky and eventually shared a studio with him before moving to L.A. in 1937. While the New York School didn’t gel until after Burkhardt left, he carried the Abstract Expressionist torch on the West Coast, painting with all of the gestural verve of his East Coast peers and a good deal more direct engagement with the world--the real, palpable world of bodily and earthly violation.

Burkhardt could paint beautifully, lyrically. His 1970 “Lovers in the City” is itself a poetic love letter. But he also had a strong proclivity for the dark side of humanity. The show at Jack Rutberg is subtitled “Sunshine & Noir” not just to link Burkhardt to the larger museum exhibition but to signal his own breadth. He could conjure a world of tenderness and beauty, but even more vividly, he could evoke the gritty textures and scorched surfaces of war.

The 1968 painting “My Lai” was preceded by paintings inspired by the Spanish Civil War and World War II and followed by works based on later wars, but is nevertheless the culmination of Burkhardt’s responses to politically induced slaughter. A daunting gray panel (77 by 115 inches) embedded with human skulls, the painting is nothing less than an upended fragment of the battlefield-turned-graveyard. Shifting the site of the massacre from the earth to the wall, from the plane of action to the plane of contemplation, Burkhardt dissolves the boundaries between life and art in as palpable a way as has ever been done by an artist.

Though the pungency of “My Lai” reverberates throughout Burkhardt’s work, that painting is Burkhardt’s most enduring statement, an experience that--like the massacre itself--cannot and should not be forgotten.

* Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, 357 N. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles, (323) 938-5222, through Dec. 24. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Wall to Wall: Paul Seawright was born in Northern Ireland, in a community he says was defined by barriers and boundaries between Protestants and Catholics. In his new color photographs at Angles Gallery, Seawright monumentalizes fragments of walls, fences and other demarcations of distance, fear and hostility. Enlarging the images to roughly 5 feet or 6 feet per side and mounting them austerely on aluminum panels, Seawright renders these slices of Belfast’s quotidian environment as icons of incivility.

Now living in Wales, Seawright has photographed several bodies of work in Northern Ireland, including one that documents the sites of sectarian-motivated murders. Landscapes densely coded with political significance, those pictures, as well as the seven recent images on view here, bear a kinship with the work of Paul Graham. Like Graham’s, Seawright’s images are insistently undramatic, yet charged with social, political and historical implications.

One photograph shows a corrugated metal wall scarred with graffiti, sandwiched between a thin stripe of earth below and a band of sky above. Another pictures the burnt remains of a tree, standing like an abandoned, desolate menhir on the outskirts of town. Two others focus on the cage-like contraptions that form security sheaths around the entrances to pubs and other buildings.

The photographs are profoundly understated, yet printed so large that they nearly match our scale, forcing a physical confrontation with the sites. More to the point, they force a psychic confrontation with the brutal architecture of mistrust. Any site is altered by what takes place there, just as its inhabitants are altered by the environment they themselves have shaped. Seawright’s photographs issue a quiet warning, a reminder that the walls we build reinforce their own necessity.

* Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through Dec. 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Exposed to the Elements: “Elements,” a group show at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, focuses on the basics: earth, air, fire and water. Fittingly, the strongest work in the show exploits no bells and whistles for effect, but is itself pared down to essentials. Good, solid painting and drawing of the natural landscape make ample appearances here.

Hilary Brace’s stunning pastel and charcoal drawings epitomize the pure splendor of pigment reverentially applied to a surface. In the pastels, Brace evokes the sublime and suggests an overarching continuity among the elements: The land she draws has all of the grace and fluidity of water; her waves are frothy as clouds; and her clouds are craggy and palpable as mountains. Brace’s small charcoal studies are equally luminous and exquisitely rendered.

Panoramic canyon-scapes by Rebecca Morales illustrate the humble beauty of scrub. Generous but not fussy with detail, Morales paints the ground-hugging plants as if slightly blurred by the wind, massaged by the living air around them. Gail Roberts, Nancy Kittredge and Candice Gawne also contribute paintings of radiant vitality.

Installation and sculpture fare less well in the show, with the exception of Mineko Grimmer’s extraordinary “Vessels.” Ten of the waist-high clay urns fill a small room, transforming it into an absorbing meditational space. In the bowl-like lid of each vessel rests a small amount of ice, which, as it melts, drips down into the large, partially filled chamber below. Kin to the chance-driven musical compositions of John Cage, Grimmer’s work produces a gentle, ever-changing score, written by the elements themselves--the earth and fire used to make the vessels, and the air and water that partner to make sound.

“Elements,” organized by curator Scott Canty, also includes work by Jen “Zen” Grey, Connie Jenkins, Ned Kahn, Dara Mark, Dennis Paul, Jan Sanchez, Lynn Small, Joe Soldate and Pat Warner.

* Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Barnsdall Art Park, 4800 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 485-4581, through Jan. 17. Open Wednesdays-Sundays.

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Images With Power: Betye Saar has long been a stalwart of the L.A. scene, an assemblage artist capable of rephrasing common matter into poems of the spirit. Saar’s current show at Jan Baum Gallery gathers various commissioned works that have been exhibited recently throughout the U.S. (including a solo show at the California African-American Museum). It’s a hodgepodge effort, but not without its powerful, eloquent moments.

“Crossings,” as the show is titled, indicates an ongoing theme in Saar’s work--the passage of Africans to the Americas in the slave trade--as well as the phenomenon that invigorates the formal practice of assemblage, the shifting of an object or image from its familiar function or context to another.

In “Brides of Bondage,” Saar recycles an ivory satin wedding dress and a group of miniature ships to striking effect. The dress, hung from a hanger as if moving forward with the arms outstretched, is empty, yet suffused with life. On its broad, pool-like train sail the boats, all but one painted a stark, gunmetal gray. Each rests on a reprint of an infamous illustration showing the sardine-like packing configuration of slaves in the hold of a boat. As the bride makes her personal passage to a new identity, she is trailed by the profound weight of collective history.

Two other installations in the show feel diluted and unresolved, though the sculpture “Diaspora’s Spirit,” a tongue-like throne of steel whose base is wrapped in chains, has a potent presence. Only one other work has the concentrated power characteristic of Saar at her best: the painting “Maiden Voyage.” In it, she layers the diagram of packed slaves atop an image of a single, shackled figure, atop a found painting of a traditional seascape with a sailing ship. The way the masts rise from the figure’s legs and hip makes for a breathless evocation of the boat as both symbol of freedom and vehicle of bondage.

* Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles, (323) 932-0170, through Dec. 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays.