Bitter truth of human nature

Is it in the ordinary everyday or under extreme conditions that human nature most reveals itself?

Philosophers and social scientists have taken this question especially seriously during the past century, whose history suggests that civilized culture and genocide both fall within the parameters of the fundamentally human. Leon Golub’s art grounds itself in that bitter truth. Golub is a humanist -- not in a sugar-coated humanitarian sense, but in terms of his brutally honest exposition of who and what we are.

For the past 50 years, he’s painted scenes of political death squads, torturers, interrogators, power being savored, exploited, abused. Drawing from ancient Greek statuary on up to photographs from sadomasochism magazines, Golub bridges the epic and the specific in canvases whose scraped surfaces are often as degraded as the subjects represented upon them.

Now just past 80, Golub remains vital as ever, as a show of recent drawings and paintings at Griffin Contemporary attests. Uncharacteristically, the canvases here -- just three, and only moderately successful -- are not the main event.

Instead, it’s the 17 modestly scaled oil stick drawings, which at first seem disarmingly quiet for Golub but have a concentrated toughness of their own. Neither commanding in size nor as consistently pungent in tone as his typical canvases, the drawings are also less obvious, more sneaky in their impact.

“Young Devil Hunting for Sinners!” is an allegorical snippet drawn in lipstick red. Its horned figure astride a horse levels a penetrating, implicating stare in our direction. “Rapt” shows a woman in self-induced ecstasy, one hand at her breast, the other between her legs. Her head tilts back sharply, and her jutting chin echoes the angles of her bent elbow and knee.

Golub condenses a formidable amount of energy in each of these emotionally and physically taut drawings. Many seem reminiscent of Goya in their plain-spoken urgency. Studies of conditions, fates, states of desperation, they employ mythical and biblical characters, as well as ordinary men, vulnerable and bloodthirsty -- all acting out their destinies in swift, smeared lines and intense color.

The aggression common to Golub’s larger work charges these smaller pieces too. They dwell on the edges, the extremes of experience, making palpable the truths revealed there.

Griffin Contemporary, 55 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 578-2280, through May 17. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Recasting objects of childhood

Discomfiting comfort objects. That’s what Claire Cowie has arrayed atop an expansive platform dominating the front gallery at Cherry de los Reyes Gallery. Cowie, a Seattle painter and sculptor making her L.A. debut here, appears to have convened a meeting of mutant stuffed animals and once-benign decorative objects.

They gather on the blue tabletop in small clusters, often with one larger character holding court among several smaller ones. Cowie’s “still life,” as she calls it, is both endearing and creepy, and certainly intriguing.

Cowie’s works derive from figurines and toys -- porcelain songbirds, stuffed bunnies -- that have charm, sometimes in saccharine excess. Cowie recasts them, literally, in resin, then dips them in white latex, rendering their forms generalized and misshapen. A rabbit’s tufted fur looks sodden with glue. A lamb’s coat appears curdled, lumpen. A giraffe’s sleek legs are instead thick and clumsy.

Some animals have human faces, some have horns, some look mired in puddles, some are missing limbs. Cowie gives the figures simplified features in watercolor, and drippy washes of pale color-outtake colors of brick, acid yellow and watery olive to match their outcast personalities.

Like Mike Kelley, Ugo Rondinone and more than a handful of other artists, Cowie plays off the rich nostalgic archive of childhood to offer up work that’s vaguely troubling. Her menagerie elicits pathos most of all, for those characters and kids alike whom fate has exiled from the dominion of the cute and cuddly.

In the gallery’s back room, Ruby Osorio builds on the momentum of her solo show here last year with tender as ever, whimsical, lyrical and complex new works on paper and fabric. Osorio’s gouache paintings on paper with hand-stitched elements are now ellipse-shaped and overlapped on the wall like echoes or bubbles. She has also taken on some new surfaces, painting in thread on fabric pillow covers and unstretched panels of ultra-suede.

One of these panels, “Pending,” depicts a woman seated on an elongated bed, her dark hair flowing across it, a few golden pears tumbling from a sack, and a door leaking a scarlet shadow. It’s a work of tremendous quiet grace, reminiscent of a Japanese woodblock print.

Cherry de los Reyes Gallery, 12611 Venice Blvd., L.A., (310) 398-7404, through May 25. Open Saturday, Sunday and by appointment.

Hybrid plants and mutant animals

Working with nothing that couldn’t be found at the neighborhood drug or office supply store, Alison Foshee has become expert at the nearly alchemical transformation of the mundane into the magnificent. She’s sculpted seashells out of fake fingernails, leaves out of staples, and spectacular blossoms out of pushpins. In her newest work at Dirt Gallery, she ventures into murkier territory than she’s visited in the past.

She still charms, but not as convincingly. Her “Hothouse Hybrids” are portraits of orchid-like flowers made entirely of colored pushpins and thumbtacks -- clear ones and metallic ones, others with scalloped edges and numbered heads. The flowers bloom like bright, sweet confections atop simple stems sprouting from bulky bulbs and hairy roots. Each is pinned to a panel of cork that’s been painted a drab, unfortunate gray or brown.

Although they don’t manage to incorporate very fruitfully the ideas about exoticism and repression in Victorian culture that Foshee cites in her artist’s statement, the “Hybrids” are indeed fertile with disjunctive combinations: sexually suggestive shapes of both feminine and masculine reference, the grotesque and the beautiful, the tacky and the grand.

Also at Dirt are new paintings by Samantha Fields. Her “Mutation Menagerie” conjures up a nightmare of genetic engineering, depicting animals with extra heads and misplaced parts. Slickly rendered in Day-Glo tangerine, grape and lime, the paintings exude a cartoonish innocence that jars -- but not purposefully enough -- with the imaginary biological horrors they represent. The show is little more than a collection of one-liners without much punch.

Dirt Gallery, 7906 Santa Monica Blvd., No. 218, West Hollywood, (323) 822-9359, through June 7. Closed Sunday through Wednesday.

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Many ways to read a photograph

James Welling has described his work as, initially, a reaction against the dryness of Conceptualism. He has spent more than 25 years making a broad range of photographs that aim to be sensuous objects in themselves, accomplishments of both abstraction and representation, as well as provocations about their shared or separate natures.

Much of the inquiry in Welling’s photographic work is fundamental to the medium itself and its quizzical multiplicity -- the photograph as simultaneous trace, transcription and interpretation. Some of these interesting, primary questions surface when regarding Welling’s photographs, but they don’t manage to make the work itself interesting.

Three groups of recent work at Regen Projects illustrate three different pictorial approaches, all eliciting the same ambivalent response. The black-and-white photographs of L.A. streets, cars and building details recall the New Topographics movement of the 1970s and its aesthetics of crisp banality. Welling’s views fall, however, into an aesthetic black hole between the intriguing and the intentionally bland.

His landscape images, also black and white, immerse us full-frame in dense brambles. The edge-to-edge skeins verge on the gestural and calligraphic, but Welling again holds back, opting instead for a cooler, more dispassionate, formulaic record.

The third group of pictures here, which Welling calls “Degrades,” are camera-less photograms made in the darkroom out of pure light. Bands of saturate color -- emerald, violet, blood -- stack one atop another, their edges blurred. Like Rothko paintings minus texture and the touch of the hand, the “Degrades” are chromatically juicy but emotionally restrained.

Welling’s work in the end is more frustrating than fulfilling. There is something slippery about it, in the way it stakes out positions then occupies them only methodically, careful to steer clear of either sensual abandon or keen insight.

Regen Projects, 633 N. Almont Drive, L.A., (310) 276-5424, through May 17. Closed Sunday and Monday.