With just a touch of abstraction

June Harwood began her career in the 1960s as a Hard Edge Abstractionist, producing sharp, brightly colored paintings in the vein of Lorser Feitelson and Karl Benjamin. (Her late husband, the critic Jules Langsner, coined the term “Hard Edge” in 1959.) In the 1970s -- to sketch an admittedly reductive chronology -- her forms began to splinter and swirl. In the 1980s the edges broke down and the forms mingled, and in the 1990s a gravelly texture entered in and the paintings developed a gestural feel.

Her show at Louis Stern Fine Arts features paintings made from 2002 to 2004, and these come close to leaving the realm of abstraction altogether. Horizon lines have emerged, along with plain indications of clouds, mountains and trees. In basic structural terms, the paintings are clearly landscapes.

Their power, however, lies in their abstract roots. In each work, one senses Harwood zeroing in on the richest, most essential forms presented by the vista at hand: a jagged band of mountains above the horizon line; a mass of green reflected in a still lake below it; volumes of clouds and clusters of trees.

A few good, solid brushstrokes anchor these forms while fuzzy clouds of muted pigment spill out around them. Distinct edges appear occasionally, primarily along the horizon, but the energy they carried in earlier work seems to have diffused across the canvas into organic masses of gently modulating color.

They’re beautifully confident paintings -- lush yet delicate, grounded yet spacious and compositionally sound yet gracefully atmospheric. Though relatively imposing in scale -- most are 4 to 5 square feet -- they have a gentle, affable presence and a generosity comparable, one imagines, to the environments they depict.

It’s common to see abstraction developing out of or alluding to landscape -- Kandinsky and Mondrian are two classic examples. Witnessing the reversal of that process -- watching landscape emerge in the context of abstraction -- is equally exciting and reminds one of the continuing relevance of that dialogue. Harwood, standing at the pinnacle of a 50-year career, appears to have distilled the best of both.

Louis Stern Fine Arts, 9002 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, (310) 276-0147, through Feb. 26. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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A dramatic gaze up at the hilltop

Amir Zaki’s large-scale photographs of hilltop houses in the San Fernando Valley play on a trope all too familiar in the wake of this season’s record-breaking rains: the fundamental instability of the Southern California landscape.

The houses are boxy, Modernist constructions, portions of which are cantilevered to float above the descending hillside. Zaki has photographed them from below and digitally removed any columns or supports, so as to give the thrilling impression that the ground has fallen away and the houses are launching upward.

The series is the strongest of three now assembled at the MAK Center. (A clever triptych from this series is also on view at Roberts & Tilton Gallery.) The second series portrays swimming pools shot from above and at skewed angles; the third, printed in a smaller format, shows domestic fireplaces that have been filled in with brick or stone.

The tone of the work is staid and matter-of-fact, even banal, which makes the peculiarities it documents all the more jarring.

The hilltop series is the most dramatic. There is something profoundly disorienting about looking at a house from its underside. The others are subtler but similarly disconcerting. The pools have a dizzying effect, while the fireplaces are perplexing and rather ridiculous.

Viewed as a group, the three series challenge everyday perceptions of domestic architecture, encouraging viewers -- as do periodic floods and mudslides -- to reevaluate the line between permanent and impermanent, stable and unstable, real and unreal.

MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House, 835 N. Kings Road, West Hollywood, (323) 651-1510, through Feb. 20. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.

Roberts & Tilton, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 549-0223, through Feb. 5. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.

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Challenging bodily perceptions

Naida Osline’s last show at Acuna-Hansen Gallery, two years ago, was an unsettlingly elegant catalog of horrors. A collection of Polaroids detailed a daunting assortment of bodily mutations, prosthetically constructed and photographed with terrific delicacy.

In her current show, she takes the risky turn of trading physical prosthetics for digital manipulation. But the results are equally rigorous and no less creepy.

The format is more or less the same -- a single figure or body part positioned against a solid background, though the backgrounds are only black or white in this case (the previous included color) and the prints are much larger (up to 33 by 25 inches), which gives the work a starker impact.

The underlying preoccupations seem to have less to do with disease -- the earlier work was filled with boils, gashes, wrinkles, protrusions and the like -- than with aging and sexuality.

In the former category, we find a gray-bearded man with an impossibly long neck and no eyeballs; a pair of craggy feet with 20 uneven toes between them; and two skeletal hands graced with as many as five joints per finger.

On the erotic side is a headless torso with a taut, sexy belly but an unsettling total of four nipples; a vertical column of orange-ish flesh resembling an elongated abdomen, marked with several belly buttons and tied up like a piece of meat; an anemone-like tangle of fingers; and a mysterious pucker of skin emerging from a pool of shadow.

The fact that the latter group is no less grotesque than the former says a great deal about the whole project. It reflects a desire to push past dominant perceptions associated with the body and dig into the fears and pleasures that lie beneath.

Acuna-Hansen Gallery, 427 Bernard St., Los Angeles, (323) 441-1624, through Feb. 12. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays.

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Getting wildlife all dressed up

Andrew Brandou’s “After Audubon” series on view at La Luz de Jesus Gallery is a tribute to that 19th century painter, produced with the skill of a trained artist but the imaginative eye of a young boy who’s spent rainy afternoons poring over an aging copy of “Birds of America” on Grandmother’s coffee table.

Each of these delicate, 16-by-20-inch watercolors mimics the style of classic Audubon prints with impressive accuracy. Various specimens of wildlife -- birds, rabbits, chipmunks and the like -- are portrayed amid the suggestion of a natural environment. The tones are faded, as if aging, and several works include the hint of water stains.

The twist is that the creatures appear in dresses, suit jackets, bonnets, woolen caps and jewelry, carrying purses, Walkmans, cameras and umbrellas. A variety of toys also appears, as if to represent specimens of another species.

The charm of the work lies in the playful idiosyncrasy of the combinations -- an owl in a black bra, translucent top and fluffy pink skirt; a sweatered snow hare alongside an AT-AT walker (one of those spindly, camel-like vehicles in “Star Wars: Episode V -- The Empire Strikes Back”); a colorful gallinule (or common moorhen) draped in jewels. There is no shortage of opportunity for cliche, but Brandou manages to avoid it throughout.

The work of Gary Taxali, on view alongside Brandou’s, also takes a basically juvenile bibliophilic impulse -- doodling in the leaves of borrowed books -- to a more artistically sophisticated level. The books he appropriates aren’t the precious kind one sees fashioned into delicate, romantic assemblage works but the thick, hardy sort that fill high school libraries and suffer the consequent abuse. He arranges their covers and pages in grids of varying sizes and embellishes these grids with an entertaining cast of cartoonish characters, random words and phrases, and icons of one sort or another.

Animating both bodies of work is an appealing sense of play, drawn from childhood but supported, in each case, by a mature iconographic sensibility.

La Luz de Jesus Gallery, 4633 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 666-7667, through Jan. 30. Open every day.