Critic’s Art Picks

Quiet terror and a sense of foreboding run through the glassy landscape paintings of the great American master Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904), and with good reason: The U.S. was either in the midst of wrenching civil war or tumultuous industrialization when he painted his most celebrated nature studies. Remarkably, Heade has never been the subject of a full-scale survey--a lapse that gets rectified by a touring exhibition arriving at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Sunday-Aug. 13).

Young Mexican-born Conceptual artist Gabriel Orozco, who now lives principally in New York, is apparently a very busy guy. Not yet 40, he will be the subject of a survey exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art (June 4-Sept. 3) that is scheduled to bring together about 100 sculptures, photographs, videos and drawings made during the past decade. (Phew!) Already a fixture on the international exhibition circuit, Orozco has not shown much in Southern California--until now.

Forget installation art and video projection. The proliferation of painting among younger artists has been the big story in L.A. (and elsewhere) in the past several years. The California Center for the Arts in Escondido rounds up some 70 recent examples by 20 practitioners for The Next Wave: New Painting in Southern California (June 4-Sept. 10). Philip Argent, Ingrid Calame, Salomon Huerta and Laura Owens are among the artists.

And if Old Master painting is more to your taste, how about the work of Hans Holbein and Albrecht Durer? Well, not exactly painting, but close. In collaboration with the St. Louis Art Museum, the J. Paul Getty Museum presents designs for stained glass windows by various Swiss and German artists at work around 1500. Painting on Light: Drawings and Stained Glass in the Age of Durer and Holbein could be the quirkiest show of the summer (July 12-Sept. 24).