The value of having some space

It’s hard to go anywhere in L.A. these days without stumbling into a conversation about buying, selling, refurbishing, refinancing or searching for a house. Home ownership has long been a central facet of the city’s culture, but the recent combination of low interest rates, scarce supply and growing demand has driven the market into an especially feverish state, fueling the obsession of those who’ve made it into the game while broadening the gap separating them from those who haven’t.

“House Bound,” a gracefully assembled group show at Sabina Lee Gallery, explores the roots of this obsession with a consistently strong selection of work concerned with architecture and domestic space. Curated by Mery Lynn McCorkle, the show features several works each from six artists and strikes an impressive balance between variety and cohesion.

The primary through line is an attention to the aesthetic and psychological dynamics of space.

On the abstract end of the spectrum are the exquisite mixed-media works of Alison Owen. Of the four included, three are flat wood panels with slightly uneven (as if amateurishly cut) edges and flawless white surfaces, each covered with a scattering of small, uneven squares made from vellum, light-colored tissue paper and thread. The other is a slender horizontal shelf made from the same painted wood and loaded with several tiny stacks of white sequins.

Here, one senses, is the architectural impulse at its most essential: the compulsive proliferation of boxes and disks, one beside or atop the other like so many adjoining rooms. The pointedly handmade quality of the work posits an appealing alternative to the dry realm of technical draftsmanship and points to the psychological underpinnings of our desire for the containment of space.

Colin Keefe takes a similar approach on a broader scale with two large and very handsome line drawings resembling aerial views of imaginary cities, each composed of several hundred small, three-dimensionally rendered boxes. Though sharp and clean, Keefe’s use of line is just shaky enough to appear, like Owen’s squares, resolutely personal, and to cast the work in a decidedly psychological light.

Wendy Hirschberg’s charming wall-mounted sculptures -- lightweight metal constructions suggesting rickety architectural models -- are also pointedly, almost recklessly, handcrafted and underscore the element of fantasy involved in the construction of domestic space.

Ann-Marie Manker’s paintings of clean, modernist interiors, all rendered in cool gray and white tones, imitate the crisp, impersonal quality of architectural illustration but subvert the effect with the inclusion in each of an extremely sympathetic caramel-colored dog or a fluffy black rabbit.

The two remaining artists, Christina Muraczewski and Elaine Chow, focus on the aesthetic qualities of domestic surfaces. Muraczewski’s blocky, largely abstract paintings mimic the clean textures and muted tones of anonymous contemporary furniture. Chow’s moody, saturated watercolors reproduce patterns found on curtains and have the illuminated quality of stained glass.

Though none of these works are geographically specific, the show speaks to a particularly L.A. frame of mind with intelligence, grace and humor.

Sabina Lee Gallery, 5365 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 935-9279, through Jan. 12. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Hard to look at, yet absorbing

The painting that hangs in the entryway of Eric Freeman’s exhibition at Western Project, opposite the front door, is a vibrant 8-foot-by-8-foot horizontally stratified field of orange, pale and luminous across the center and fading gently toward brown at the top and bottom. It’s a smooth, warm and inviting work; moving toward it into the gallery feels like walking into a sunset.

The other four paintings, all comparable in size and hung squarely on the four walls of the gallery’s main space, are similarly luminous but less organic in tone. Stepping into the space between them is a comparatively electrifying experience.

One features four vertical, neon-toned bands -- pink, orange, blue and green -- against a black ground; another, three horizontal bands -- two thick, one thin -- of silvery white. A third consists of a massive, neon-green cross; the fourth, a large blue square fading at the edges into green, then black, then bright yellow around the circumference of the canvas.

All of the works, though composed solely in good old-fashioned oil paint, seem quite convincingly to pulsate. None of the shapes lay flat on the canvas: The cross and the bands give the impression of bulging outward, while the blue square appears to sink in toward the wall. They resonate with the soft, steady buzz of the gallery lights, and it’s easy to suspect, standing in the middle of the room, that you’ve been caught in some sort electromagnetic crossfire. They’re difficult to look at yet irresistibly absorbing.

It is to Freeman’s credit that such clever optical trickery doesn’t function as an end in itself but carries the work toward a sort of sublimity. Though clearly indebted to Rothko, Turrell, Irwin, Flavin and the other Minimalists, it’s a particularly contemporary sublimity, informed as much by the glow of computer monitors and cellphone screens as that of a sunset.

Western Project, 3830 Main St., Culver City, (310) 838-0609, through Thursday. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Passion of artist shows through

Sam Kirszencwajg, who immigrated to the U.S. from Belgium at 16, studied art in New York in the late 1950s and remains, judging from recent work, heavily indebted to the ethos of Abstract Expressionism. It emerges in statements with a certain crankiness -- he decries, for example, the “increasingly materialistic, antierotic and antihumanistic bias of postmodernism” -- but endows the work itself with an often irresistible vigor.

The 11 paintings in his current exhibition at Don O’Melveny Gallery are clearly the product of one who loves paint: They’re colorful, gestural, crowded, full-bodied and youthfully energetic. Every surface inch has been aggressively cared for. The imagery is figural and collage-like and, despite Kirszencwajg’s stated aversion to postmodernism, one senses the influence of David Salle, Julian Schnabel and the other Neoexpressionists alongside that of De Kooning, Guston and earlier luminaries.

Kirszencwajg’s principal subjects are full-bodied nude women, often wearing painted geisha masks. (The title of the exhibition is “Japonesque / Icons.”) While I’m suspicious of Kirszencwajg’s conceptual intentions here -- his comments in the exhibition brochure regarding the “erotic force” of the “eternal and mythical feminine presence” are bound to make a feminist of my generation uneasy -- his facility in their rendering is undeniable and his penchant for tangling them in circuitry and other electronic paraphernalia is admittedly intriguing.

The point is presumably to assert the primacy of the figure over the machine -- humanity over technology -- but the more lasting effect is an assertion of the primacy of the hand specifically: that is, the manual craft of painting. Where these figures emerge in Kirszencwajg’s busy compositions -- a breast here, an ankle there, a twisting torso somewhere else -- their voluptuous rendering energizes the entire canvas.

Don O’Melveny Gallery, 5472 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 932-0076, through Thursday. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Playing it safe, believe it or not

The 16 paintings in Curtis Ripley’s exhibition at William Turner Gallery are bright, pleasant abstractions, characterized by fields of blurred color and a variety of floating accents, including a blue diamond, the outline of a circle and -- the most frequent -- a globular knot of lines resembling a scientific diagram of a molecule.

At their best, they’re lullingly atmospheric works, suggesting the view through a foggy or rain-streaked window. The background colors are bold and tumble together with a certain recklessness -- periwinkle, lemon yellow, navy, tangerine and lavender in one of the most striking; turquoise, bubble gum pink, yellow, red, gray and black in another, with sharp streaks of green and hot pink -- bringing the surface of the canvas buoyantly to life.

Just as often, however, the colors are tame, polite and seem not to tumble but to placidly coexist or else melt into a murky middle tone, leaving the work feeling flat and limited.

Though never entirely disagreeable, these latter works leave one longing something more substantial: a sharper gesture, a darker mood, something irresponsible. One wonders what Ripley might discover should he abandon the pretense of prettiness and attempt something ugly, angry or garish. It is often on that more dangerous precipice that real beauty takes root.

William Turner Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., E-1, Santa Monica, (310) 453-0909, through Jan. 15. Closed Sundays.