A curator and her compatriot

In 1993, Catherine Opie made a brilliant photograph that could be the poster image for the dramatic civil rights issue of gay marriage. A stick-figure drawing, like a child’s earnest scrawl, showed two smiling girls holding hands in front of a cheerful house. This sentimental image of innocent love had been carved with a knife blade into the freckled skin of Opie’s own back. Its bloody, scarified trail offers eloquent testimony to the complex visceral anguish within familial life.

At Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Opie has organized a show of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-89), whose work would be historic if only because its frequent homosexual subject matter slammed the empty closet door and nailed it shut. Given her own photographic sensibility, she’s an ideal curator for his.

“Pictures, Pictures” brings together 44 Mapplethorpe works from the ‘70s and ‘80s, arrayed with sharp insight and great style. Opie rarely strays far from ideas of home and communities in her own photographs; her Mapplethorpe show underscores similar -- though differently constructed -- ideas in his. Autobiography moves to the foreground.

Mapplethorpe’s pictures are displayed almost in the manner of a photographic essay. It reads from left to right around the room, beginning and ending with self-portraits. They frame examples of every kind of image Mapplethorpe made: friends, lovers, celebrities, the demimonde, children, sculptures, pornography, flowers, etc.

In this context, the selection is like peering inside the jumble of an artist’s head. A shoulder-length portrait of bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger, posed like a Roman bust, is typical of Mapplethorpe’s formal references to art history. And it shows his unexpected take on things: Schwarzenegger was famous for his body, but Mapplethorpe’s portrait omits the muscles.

A volley of hope tinged with despair attends the show’s famous opening image -- a tattered American flag, flapping in an unseen wind and illuminated from behind by a hidden sun. This symbol of fragile liberty is hung next to two fragmentary self-portraits, both made from body parts.

The first is an intense close-up of Mapplethorpe’s careworn eyes, one in shadow and the other brightly illuminated. Perception is condensed into equal, if conflicted, territories of darkness and light.

The second shows a youthful, casually outstretched arm. The pose recalls the arm of Jesus laid out on the cross, just before the nail was driven through flesh. Elegance and serenity foreshadow suffering and redemption.

A second version of this picture, not in the show, includes the artist’s grinning head. Opie’s choice of this limb-only rendition gives quiet testimony to something other than grandiose presumptions of persecution.

Mapplethorpe was raised in the Roman Catholic Church; he understood the power of imagery as well as any pope has. Historically, the church’s iconoclastic Protestant enemies demonized images of any kind as Satan’s handiwork. Sound familiar? Mapplethorpe’s infamous 1978 self-portrait with a bullwhip protruding from his backside is not only a frank portrait of sadomasochistic sexuality. It’s also a blunt description of the devil, complete with tail.

It’s no surprise that Mapplethorpe became a focus of Christian-right animus during the Reagan-era culture wars, when conservative Protestants led the political assault against his imagery. The “devil” photograph hangs at the end of the show, next to a self-portrait of the artist dressed in a silk robe and velvet slippers, seated in a grand chair, his face emaciated and ravaged by AIDS. It was among his last works.

If this image looks familiar, it’s because Mapplethorpe’s erudite work is informed by the history of art. Here, the pose and wardrobe recall Cezanne’s “Portrait of Achille Emperaire” (1869-70); that painting shows Cezanne’s friend and fellow artist -- a bony, misshapen dwarf clad in robe and slippers -- enthroned as grandly as Napoleon in red velvet and ermine.

Like Cezanne’s painting, Mapplethorpe’s photograph depicts a socially marginal, lowlife character in a composition associated with archetypal images of authority. That’s one key to understanding his entire output as an artist. As a curator, Opie deftly illuminates the work of a compatriot -- and perhaps her own as well.

Marc Selwyn Fine Art, 6222 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 933-9911, through March 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

A stroll along

the boardwalk

The typological photographs of the German duo Bernd and Hilla Becher have been so influential for so long -- more than a quarter-century -- that, at this late date, it’s difficult to imagine anything fresh coming from their example. Yet Swiss artist Beat Streuli manages a bit of that in a new two-channel video projection at LACE.

As at his recently closed solo show of monumental photographs at the Roberts & Tilton Gallery (his L.A. debut), Streuli’s subject is people in crowds. At LACE, that means pedestrians on the Venice boardwalk.

His video camera trails along beside them as they travel singly, in pairs or sometimes three across. Flat strips of sand and sea softly blur behind them. The fact that they rarely acknowledge the camera’s presence adds to a viewer’s voyeuristic pleasure in secret people-watching.

Sometimes in color, sometimes in black and white, and always without sound, the imagery is washed out from the bright Pacific light. The speed is slowed; bust-length figures seem to drift across two facing walls on which the videos are projected. Ordinary folks bob gracefully, unfocused on the passing scene. Except for the absence of a destination, they look rather like horses pictured in a photo finish.

In addition to the Bechers, Walker Evans is a notable precedent for this oddly hypnotic work. Between 1938 and 1941, Evans took portraits in the New York subway with a small camera secretly strapped to his chest. The subjects -- wonderfully oblivious to being watched -- comported themselves in ways they otherwise wouldn’t. A viewer got to stare at subway riders in a way that ran counter to public etiquette.

Same here, except that a boardwalk provides a different context. These passersby seem infused with a nonchalant well-being that is lovely to behold.

My advice: Stand fairly close, so that Streuli’s figures are 12 feet tall and the image is monumental. Ordinary public communion becomes heroic.

LACE, 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, (323) 957-1777, through April 18. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.

Psychological landscapes

Twelve new paintings by New York artist Maureen Gallace focus on domestic landscapes in and around coastal New England, but she marshals her materials to make the vicissitudes of light and space as physically tangible as wood or rock.

A small slab of white oil paint serves as light on the side of a clapboard house. The space between an outdoor railing and a stair is a chunk of yellow-inflected green. Marks of blue make sky caress treetops.

At the Michael Kohn Gallery, these modest paintings exhibit a presence more emphatic than their small size might suggest. Each is roughly as big as an ordinary sheet of paper, none larger than 14 inches on a side. Gallace pays attention to every detail of their fabrication.

She paints on unframed wood panels that stand an inch or so away from the wall. Each painting reads as a plane -- a flat object -- rather than a two-dimensional surface. The effect is enhanced by shadows cast on the wall, which objectify the gallery’s light.

So does Gallace’s deliberate handling of paint, which is laid on in clear, considered, usually flat strokes. The marks of her brush echo the clear, flat light of the depicted landscapes, whether in winter or (more often) summer. Her cabins, houses and barns, together with the snowy fields, sandy beaches or green trees that engulf them, possess an uncanny quality -- like thought materialized.

This can be psychologically daunting, especially when the pictured domicile is without doors or windows. We regularly associate landscapes with expansiveness, but Gallace’s can seem closed off, strangely unsettling, even vaguely claustrophobic. They feel like, well, home.

The best exude a remarkable atmospheric specificity -- a right now, right herequality. One is titled “4th of July, Fairfield, Conn.,” and it’s hard not to imagine the work as a sly nod to the great Fairfield Porter. He’s her aesthetic godfather, and she’s proving herself a worthy heir.

Michael Kohn Gallery, 8071 Beverly Blvd., L.A., (323) 658-8088, through Feb. 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Bits and pieces, cut and diced

For his first L.A. show since 2000, New York Carroll Dunham has brought 13 small paintings to the Daniel Weinberg Gallery. They are pallid and perfunctory.

Dunham gained some notoriety a decade ago for a series of derivative paintings that employed Philip Guston’s bracing cartoon style, world-weary imagery and bleary palette. The small works here slice and dice “Mr. Nobody,” the central character that emerged in Dunham’s work. A phallic, grimacing, beleaguered guy in a silly top hat, he was Charlie Brown all grown up into a funny uncle.

These paintings dissect that figure into graphic abstractions of individual body parts -- tooth, testicles, throat, left shoulder, etc. All are brushy pink and brown, colors that read like Pepto-Bismol and poop.

Each painting is but a collection of references to Dunham’s past work. That explains why they seem like mere souvenirs.

Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 6148 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 954-8425, through March 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.