Vying for attention with frustrating diversification

For all the gamesmanship in Anton Henning’s work, his show at Christopher Grimes Gallery ought to be a lot more fun than it is. Instead it’s provocative but also frustrating and self-satisfied. Henning works hard at making his paintings vibrant, but ultimately there’s more to chew on than to look at.

The Berlin-based artist calls his first L.A. solo show “Was ihr wollt!” (“What You Want!”). He imagines, apparently, that we want him to be all things to all people, because at first glance, Henning’s show looks like a group effort. But that’s intentional, part of the ploy.

Among the paintings here, all from the last few years, there are abstractions -- canvases sliced into wedges of color by thick, solid lines. There are nudes -- monochromatic, second-generation “pinups” in coral and smoky eggplant. There are self-portraits in various guises; still lifes with loopy, stylized flowers; and a few domestic interiors. One is painted in a snazzy palette that out-Fauves the Fauves. The other, a huge canvas (105 inches by 142 inches), is built up of oversized impressionistic daubs. Both depict conventional living rooms with sofas, tables, chairs, lamps and art on the walls -- none other than Henning’s own paintings.

This kind of hall-of-mirrors self-referencing engages viewers in Henning’s game by offering a superficially satisfying “Aha!” of recognition when one of his motifs doubles back on itself. The paintings, otherwise, are not remarkable. They’re competent, often a bit clumsy. It’s his “project,” his cunning postmodern play on the multiplicity of identity and the multifariousness of influence, if anything, that sustains our attention.

This is intellectual strategy played out in material terms. Henning is clever and well versed, quoting from Matisse, Courbet and others. He coyly plants an ambiguous personal symbol (in emulation of Roy Lichtenstein, perhaps) in many of his paintings. In one of the show’s self-portraits, the artist holds an organic-looking, three-lobed thing he calls a “Hennling.” In another painting, he raises it to the sky. Its repetition sends a frail unifying thread through the work and, again, offers the initiated that quiet thrill of recognition.

Henning’s work ends up reading like an argument instead of tasting like a feast. It makes its points -- eroding the myth of stylistic unity, validating appropriation and self-appropriation -- but never convinces on a visceral level.

Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through Aug. 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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A sterile sort of handsomeness

Photographers Jonathan Anderson and Edwin Low met in 1989 while sharing a London darkroom. They began collaborating on shoots and have worked as a team since, specializing in black-and-white architectural photography and images of the human form. Their first local show, at Apex Fine Art (like Henning’s, part of the L.A. International Biennial), includes a few immaculately executed architectural interiors but mostly favors the pair’s ongoing examination of athletes and gymnasts.

Slick stylists and proficient technicians, Anderson and Low turn out consistently handsome, bloodless work. In a series featuring the national Danish gymnastic team, the photographers stage tableaux based on the four elements. The gymnasts, nude, spring through flaming hoops in the fire section and, in the group themed on air, leap and levitate against a sky as pure as the seamless studio backgrounds the photographers usually use. These shots of gymnasts in all their naked perfection and choreographed order deliver a sterile kind of beauty. It’s a formalist celebration of the male body, a depersonalized homoeroticism that revels in the ripples and curves of prime physical specimens.

Portraits of international athletes at their training facilities reveal slightly more in terms of context and personality. Another series, of lounging male nudes printed in a narrow range of soft grayish browns, also injects some intimacy into the work, but again, only of a staged, conventional sort. It’s no wonder that Anderson and Low have found professional athletes such compelling subjects, since their own approach is so athletic in nature. It allows no flab or sloppiness. Highly controlled, taut and vigorous, it sees passion only as fuel for discipline.

Apex Fine Art, 152 N. La Brea Ave., (323) 634-7887, through Aug. 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Tastes of a visual smorgasbord

“Mind’s Eye” at SolwayJones is another of those hit-and-miss summer group shows, a visual cocktail party of casual introductions, pleasantries and, if you’re lucky, an encounter or two that outlasts the hors d’oeuvres.

Patricia Smith’s watercolor and ink drawings are the life of this party -- devious, attractive and noncommittal. In the guise of maps and promotional materials, they articulate slightly unsettling social phenomena and psychological patterns. The isolated oval plot diagramed in “Center for Loss Prevention,” for instance, suggests both the individual mind and the broader culture. Its compartmentalized sections -- labeled “safekeeping,” “hoarding,” “damaged goods,” “grief” and so on -- add up to a strategy of coping, employed not just on a personal scale but institutionally and even politically. The seductive clarity of Smith’s drawing clashes brilliantly with her tone of quiet subversion.

Among the other L.A. and New York artists whose work was assembled by artist and curator Mery Lynn McCorkle are Andre Yi, who combines flat, stylized imagery with more dimensional renderings to interesting effect; Shari Mendelson, who contributes an unremarkable painted brass sculpture; and Alexandra Grant, whose method of visualizing text through drawing and sculpting words in wire is promising but not well realized.

Nancy Monk shows small, ordinary portraits overlaid with painted patterns. Leslie Kneisel is represented by two wall-mounted cushions, embroidered with a surreal continuum of human and animal figures. Samantha Fields presents tedious digital prints of mutant animals (recently shown at Dirt Gallery), and Eung Ho Park rounds off the group with a charming assemblage of bottle caps painted with eyeballs and mounted on the wall in two tall, vibrant stripes.

SolwayJones, 5377 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 937-7354, through Sept. 6. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Freshly minted in the Old World

What an array of new names and new works has been carried in on the breeze that is the L.A. International Biennial. Surprises are plentiful, and if not always splendid, they still refresh during the late summer doldrums.

Koplin Del Rio’s exhibition of six European artists, half new to the gallery and half seen there before, was organized by Henry Klein, a professor of printmaking and drawing at L.A. Valley College. Klein has proved himself an able emissary. Overall, the show is gratifying, well stocked with the wondrous, the curious and the mysterious.

Bodies writhe, plunge and merge in Oldrich Kulhanek’s tour de force “Downfall” lithographs, which are actually tame compared with other surrealistic dramas the Czech artist has made. On the quieter, gentler side, Czech Jan Hisek’s delicate pencil drawings whisper of another realm. Familiar forms of fish, flowers and sea creatures cavort in these tiny, elusive scenes, weightless as dandelion spores.

Jochen Stucke, from Germany, displays an exquisite touch in his ink drawings on the grisly subject of the plague. His sensibility seems akin to Goya’s, his vision steeped in both literary and art historical tradition.

Belgians Ingrid Ledent and Enk de Kramer shift the focus away from the figurative. Ledent uses a photographic image of her naked torso as a template, starting a drawn spiral at the navel, or shrinking and repeating the image to the point where it reads as abstract pattern. In his rich monoprints, De Kramer builds up planes of texture and pattern, as dense in places as asphalt, and in others as ephemeral and soft as ash.

Slovakian artist Katarina Vavrova rounds out the show with slightly saccharine etchings of women in dreamscapes of disjunctive scale. They are the least memorable entries in an otherwise intriguing show.

Koplin Del Rio Gallery, 464 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 657-9843, through Sept. 6. Closed Sundays and Mondays.