Flux Paintings Make Case for a Career Worth Reconsidering

A superficial resemblance marks the famous drip paintings begun by Jackson Pollock in 1947 and the flux paintings begun five years earlier by Knud Merrild (1894-1954). (The Danish-born Modernist painter left Europe after World War I, spent time in Taos, N.M., with D.H. Lawrence and Mable Dodge, and arrived in Los Angeles in 1923; Pollock, a generation younger, didn’t arrive until 1928, at age 16.) However, the operative word here is superficial. Significant differences separate Pollock’s paintings from Merrild’s, and Merrild’s ought to be regarded in their own right as something more than odd precursors or aspiring wannabes.

At Steve Turner Gallery, a welcome survey of three dozen paintings and works on paper by Merrild culminates in six small flux paintings made between 1942 and 1946. (According to the gallery, it’s the largest assembly of Merrild’s work here since the 1965 retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.) As the term implies, flux paintings turn on fluidity--on allowing liquid colors to interact, flow through one another and fuse, both with the guidance of the artist’s hand and independent of his direction.

Merrild made them by pouring thin streams of chemically manipulated paint onto liquid surfaces placed horizontally. Sometimes he would draw in the wet paint with a stick or the end of a brush. Mostly he would let the pigments go their own way--”painting by remote control,” as the artist put it--allowing time to exert its fourth-dimensional power.

In “Before the Beginning There Was No Word” (1944), mottled forms in silvery black and golden brown ooze across (and in) the grayish ochre surface. The little “Aroma of Birth” (1942), which is maybe 10 inches by 8 inches, is composed from pale, crinkled color--pink, gray-green, dusty umber--shot through with black, almost like Venetian paper; near the bottom, a butterfly seems to emerge from the visual soup. “Littoral Flux” (1946), with its seashore title, has the appearance of life forms growing in a tide pool of raspberry, ochre, pink and gray pigments.

Merrild’s flux paintings are a unique and original form of Abstract Surrealism, loosely related to the work of artists like Andre Masson and Roberto Matta, and directly linked to automatism, which was cultivated by the Surrealists as a direct avenue to the unconscious mind. They represent a technical leap from his skillful works from the 1930s, when Cubist-derived abstractions and Surrealist dreamscapes dominated his output. These form the bulk of the exhibition.

In several sophisticated reliefs, Merrild mixed assemblage techniques with cutout forms to create structures of interlocking positive and negative space. Cast shadows form a light-induced bridge between material form and openness, establishing the work of art as an extension of the space in the room. Sexualized shapes often suggest regeneration, while a 1935 collage, “Alpha and Omega,” creates a loosely narrative life cycle.

Merrild suffered a major heart attack in 1951, stopped painting and shortly thereafter returned to Copenhagen for medical care; he died in 1954, at age 60. The consolidation of the New York School during precisely those years meant that Merrild would certainly be eclipsed. The Turner show offers a terrific thumbnail sketch of a career worth reconsidering in depth.

* Steve Turner Gallery, 275 S. Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-3721, through June 17. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Still Life With Quirk: For a work titled “Stutter,” Dave Muller made a series of four large colored-pencil drawings of clothing (his own?) hanging on a closet rod. Like a Jasper Johns alphabet or a Charles Ray inventory, one thing comes after another in these gently drawn, oddly affecting works, just as they were found: backpack, blue pants, polka-dot shirt, plaid shirt, orange sweatshirt, etc. The lineup continues across three framed sheets, each 40 inches high and 32 inches wide. A fourth drawing, hanging below and between Nos. 2 and 3, continues the rendering of a few articles of clothing that hang too low to fit in the space of the drawings above.

Whatever the artist found hanging on the clothing rod determined the overall shape of Muller’s drawing. Yet, a compositional quirk suddenly (if surreptitiously) intrudes on this eccentric still life. A green jersey near the right edge of the first drawing turns up again near the left edge of the second, while a maroon-striped shirt does the same between the second and third drawings. Your continuous visual scan from left to right gets subtly interrupted and briefly repeated--a perceptual stutter--just as it does vertically by the fourth drawing that drops beneath the horizontal expanse.

It’s sort of like a film that slips a few frames, making you conscious of its artifice. Muller has a way with making viewers first consider, then reconsider what they see.

Activities of sorting, cataloging and making lists form a leitmotif in Muller’s second engaging solo show at Blum & Poe Gallery. In most of the drawings, outmoded technologies are pictured, taking the form of record albums, Super-8 kiddie movies and Polaroid photographs. Like Warhol’s 1960s painting of a 1920s telephone, Muller’s colored pencils and watercolor resonate as obsolete mediums of communication, asserting themselves in an age of digital manufacture. The usefulness of drawing is as a sign for thought, measured deliberation and social difference; its usefulness is as art.

“A Beginning” punningly lines up a shelf of record albums that begin with the letter A--Herb Alpert, Chet Atkins, ABBA--but the internal alphabetical order quickly breaks down. “Annex” is an album free-for-all, with Mama Cass, Julian Bream, “Wild Stereo Drums” and others sharing space. “An Ending” is, contradictorily, a diptych, its two panels marching from Barry White to Frank Zappa.

Perhaps the most peculiar work in the show is an ongoing project in which Muller proposes possible cover images for a calendar designed by a friend. A shoe, a skirt, the theme restaurant at LAX, a bracelet, a ball--these snapshots of ordinary objects are drawn, painted and laminated as imitation Polaroid photographs. For Muller, art-making comes across as a subtle sanctification of the interdependence between individual experience and social continuity.

* Blum & Poe Gallery, 2042 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-8311, through May 26. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Office Supplies Redeemed: In her third solo exhibition at Dirt Gallery, Alison Foshee has become like an obsessed clerical worker, determined to transform the office bulletin board into a thing of redemptive beauty. That she succeeds is no small amazement.

In the past, Foshee has made seashells from fake fingernails and plant leaves from staples. In “forget me not,” a group of eight complete works (plus 31 studies) made from bulletin boards and pushpins expands that Pop Surrealist horizon exponentially. Each board is painted a solid color--red, white, slate, yellow, black, burgundy or light green--and then thickly encrusted with ornate, remarkably inventive clusters made from thousands of thumbtacks stuck into foam supports.

Who knew that pushpins were so diverse? Flat-headed, round-headed, fan-shaped, tipped with pearls, numbered, transparent, opaque, plastic, metal--the densely patterned displays are meticulous in their assembly and endearing in their cheap but elegant appeal. Like a gigantic ball of rubber bands, the craft orientation makes the work feel accessible, while the obsessiveness and precision set it on a higher plane.

Foshee’s still-life compositions tend to be bilaterally symmetrical and centered in the painted field (the largest work is just over 5 feet high and 4 feet wide). The glittery, usually abstract results are like Rorschach inkblots that invite free association and daydreams. For me, they suggest floral bouquets, models of space stations, gigantic jewelry and birthday cake decoration.

A bulletin board is one place where bureaucratic society communicates with itself, while in the home it’s an area for compiling bits of memory. Foshee fudges the boundary between public and private in these works, enlivening both with imaginative verve.

* Dirt Gallery, 7906 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood, (323) 822-9359, through July 21. Closed Sunday through Wednesday.

Portraits of Transience: Snowdrifts outside an emptied public swimming pool; a vacant, bucket-style chair in an airport lounge; the unoccupied back seat of a limousine, doors flung open; an airplane glimpsed at takeoff from a car traveling in the opposite direction; a cocktail on a napkin on a bar. The 18 lovely gouaches by New York-based artist Dike Blair at Works on Paper Inc. are devoid of people, yet they’re also brimming over with unconquerable wanderlust.

Transience mingles with poignant beauty in these carefully wrought little paintings, which are based on casual photographs. Sometimes, as in a passing glance at a Palm Springs house or a Vija Celmins-like view out an automobile windshield at the freeway ahead, an incongruous burst of white light records a camera’s flash reflected off glass. The flash enhances the feeling of the drawing as a souvenir.

Light is in fact something of a main character in these delicate works. It’s reflected through raindrops on a windowpane, shines through champagne glasses in a limo’s liquor cabinet, gleams off a glass filled with crimson cocktail stirrers and glistens on the edge of a cigarette-filled ashtray. We might be just passing through, these gouaches assert, but that’s all the more reason to swoon.

* Works on Paper Inc., 6150 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 964-9675, through June 9. Closed Sunday and Monday.