Emotions of childhood linger in paint

Nicole Eisenman has long been known for her humor -- a tool she deploys to slice open social convention and skewer traditional notions of gender and sexuality. Here, in a wonderfully stimulating exhibition of new work, this humor assumes a rather sweet, even poignant quality. The social critique is generally less overt than in past work, but is gainfully fused in several works with what seems a compassionate interest in issues of childhood and adolescence.

“The Anxiety of Adolescent Boys Hanging Onto the Last Moments of Their Innocence” (2002), for example, is a large painting in which a 1950s-era printed image of two boys swinging on a rope floats at the center of a dense, yellow and orange storm of hellfire strewn with Dante-esque knots of naked, groping bodies.

It is an emotionally rich, albeit remarkably straightforward, work in which the agile combination of classical and pop culture allusions comes to seem not only effortless, but also strangely profound.

Eisenman has worked in a wide variety of media successfully, but the current exhibition benefits from its two-dimensional focus. Fusing elements of Italian Renaissance painting, American social realism, comic books and, in the paintings, fragments of found photography, Eisenman has forged a rich and unique style.

It’s a pleasure simply to revel in the confidently sensual lines of her drawings, to drift through the adventurous palette that characterizes each painting and to wonder at the peculiar narratives that animate her full-bodied figures.

Not all of the paintings are equally memorable, but the three or four that stand out rank among the most interesting encountered in recent memory.

Perhaps the most spectacular of these is “Mournful Tribute to the Willow Tree by Troupe of Virginal Monster Children” (2002), in which a gaggle of slightly green-skinned young girls in pink frocks stumble toward the viewer across a flat turquoise field, flailing their arms in a muted sort of hysteria.

It’s a bizarre but utterly hypnotic painting that lingers in the memory long after one leaves the gallery.

If Eisenman grapples, as many do, with the possibilities and limitations of figurative painting in the contemporary world, she lights upon a small revelation here: the capacity of such painting to challenge the viewer’s mental hold on the world by suffusing an approximation of visual reality with an illogical emotional resonance. The effect is entrancing.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., B1, Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through Jan. 25. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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An unsettling path through girlhood

The first photograph one encounters in “Girl Culture,” Lauren Greenfield’s current exhibition at Stephen Cohen Gallery, depicts a 4-year-old girl named Allegra playing dress-up in a sunny Malibu bedroom. Wearing a pink leotard and oversize gold lame shoes, she assumes a pose of exaggerated femininity that might be construed as mere play but for the alarmingly precise expression of runway-model cool in the girl’s striking blue eyes. Although too young to read, Greenfield suggests, Allegra has already begun to master the intricate codes of gesture and expression that go into the social performance of female beauty.

The photographs that follow -- which constitute about half of the total number in Greenfield’s recently published book of the same title -- chart an unsettling path through the rites and rituals of American girlhood.

More than a little indebted to Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s eye-opening book “The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls,” which argues that despite major feminist advances during the last century, girls are more dangerously body conscious today than ever before, Greenfield focuses primarily on the ways in which these girls grapple with their physicality.

She tends toward extremes: weight-loss camps and eating disorder clinics, debutante balls and bodybuilding competitions, strip clubs and raunchy spring break gatherings in Florida.

Throughout, she proves herself an extremely talented photojournalist with an acute sensitivity for the relationship between subject and environment, as well as a knack for cultivating images that are both communicative and visually compelling.

It is not, on the whole, a cheerful story. There’s little joy, it seems, on either end of the beauty spectrum: the rail-thin actress modeling Versace in the lobby of the Standard Hotel, or the homely 13-year-old Leah posing gloomily for her “before” picture at weight-loss camp. Although these girls smile for Greenfield’s camera when it addresses them directly, their most common expression by far is one of nervous preoccupation. These girls’ bodies, to paraphrase Barbara Kruger, are battlegrounds; they are accumulating scars, visible and invisible, every day.

One might argue that there’s another side to this story -- the girl-power angle. Greenfield’s take is probably, on the whole, the more realistic, and it is to her credit that she captures it with such clarity.

Stephen Cohen Gallery, 7358 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 937-5525, through Feb. 8. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Battle of the gods of industry, nature

German photographer Hans-Christian Schink spent six years -- from 1995 to 2001 -- tracking the development of a vast new network of autobahns across the countryside of what was once East Germany. Given plans for future routes and special access to construction sites, he was able to observe the mechanics of the project at close range and with a privileged familiarity.

The series that resulted, however, now on view at Ace Gallery, comes across less as a technological or sociological document than a fantasy epic in which the gods of nature and industry battle it out for control of the planet.

The photographs are monumental, both in size (72 by 85 inches) and composition. In each, some branch of the autobahn system -- a flat freeway, a bridge, an overpass or a tunnel -- stretches across a landscape of bucolic farmland. The concrete and iron structures, often photographed at close range, are colossal and dauntingly imperious in design. As Schink configures them, they look a lot like soldiers in a sci-fi army of giants: mindless and inhumanly efficient.

The countryside, on the other hand, might as well have been extracted from an 18th century romantic novel: There are green fields, still ponds and picturesque valleys with rugged dirt paths, along which one might expect to find a lumbering donkey cart loaded with produce for market. The only signs of human life in the photographs are a few clumps of modest farmhouses.

Curiously, Schink himself doesn’t seem to have chosen sides in this battle: He is as fascinated by the new structures as he is nostalgic for the landscape. A native of East Germany, he’s no doubt aware of the political and historical implications of the region’s economic redevelopment, but he raises those issues to a symbolic level here. In the stark contrast between freeway and landscape, one discerns larger struggles between technology and nature, progress and history, mobility and tradition.

Visually articulate but resolutely impersonal, the photographs leave to the viewer any conclusions regarding these issues.

Ace Gallery, 5514 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 935-4411, through February. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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An elegant yet spare lesson

“Voice Lessons,” Claudia Matzko’s exhibition at Angles, is a studiously refined project that remains true at every turn to the concept set forward in its title.

One of the works is an elegant installation of bone props -- tiny, capsule-shaped objects used to train the mouth and vocal cords -- that Matzko has cast in silver-plated bronze and embedded like a constellation of stars in one of the gallery’s walls.

Another involves a live myna bird that is subjected every half-hour to a passage of Henry Purcell’s opera “Dido and Aeneas,” and that may or may not be learning to repeat the principal phrase of that passage, “Remember me.”

Perhaps the most intriguing of the works -- although not especially interesting to watch -- is “The Teacher” (2002), a video projection involving an empty stage and four consecutive versions of a song by Samuel Barber, the progression between which reflects the teaching process itself. In the first, we hear only the voice of one male tenor (presumably the teacher); in the second, both his voice and that of a female soprano who then appears on the stage (presumably the student); in the third, a digital combination of the two voices; and in the fourth, only the soprano.

It’s a spare body of work: a few clever conceptual strands threaded through a self-consciously minimal assortment of objects. Unfortunately, none of these concepts comes through as a real revelation. Many are difficult to infer from the objects themselves, and, once revealed, fail to expand much with contemplation.

In the end, the show feels a little like a pleasant cocktail party with too few hors d’oeuvres: With little for either the eye or the mind to feast upon, one leaves disappointedly hungry.

Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through Jan. 18. Closed Sunday and Monday.