Art Around Town: Daniel Dove, M.A. Peers and Takashi Murakami

Daniel Dove at Cherry and Martin

Sandeep Mukherjee, Untitled (Long Gold Spiral) (2008)

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Sandeep Mukherjee, Untitled (Long Gold Spiral) (2008)

M.A. Peers, Found Yuppie (2007)

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More About

• Sandeep Mukherjee
• Daniel Dove
• M.A. Peers
• Takashi Murakami
• Visual Arts

(Click to enlarge)

M.A. Peers, Found Yuppie (2007)

Daniel Dove seems more like another hatchling from Leipzig or Düsseldorf than a Yalie who resides in San Luis Obispo, where he teaches at Cal Poly. Like the better of the young Germans to whom he is artistic kin, Dove possesses a combination of technical facility and awareness of history and tradition that’s hard to come by in this country unless it is tethered to academic dryness; a talent for producing illusionistic spaces that seem convincing and concrete yet also theatrical and mercurial; a capacity for comingling reverie and discomfort, as well as a preoccupation with the poppest of pop culture and the gravitas of the sublime; and an utter deftness in getting formal plays, painterly licks, abstract chunks, pop-graphic tools and illusionistic devices to trade roles with one another. Just check out a painting like Autopsy, in which one sees the apparent bombed-out fuselage of an airliner — the cockpit, wings and tail cropped by the edges of the canvas — reconstructed in a hangar. Here, straightedged, spiky, cartoonish outcroppings suggestive of the way a spinach can looks when Popeye’s finished with it give graphic interpretation to unpicturable prior events. Time and space go wonky by way of such formal play; dynamic, radiant abstraction richly violates the horizontality of the scene; and the abstract/graphic elements take on presence (casting telltale shadows) and take charge of meaning while the “picture” in this painting goes flat as background and back story. Cherry and Martin, 12611 Venice Blvd., L.A., 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; thru Sat., May 24. (310) 398-7404 or www.cherryandmartin.com.

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M.A. Peers at Rosamund Felsen Gallery

Just who among us would allow themselves to make paintings of jowly corporate types dressed in bobtailed-bear-cub plushy suits, climbing stairs into something resembling the aurora borealis as painted by Helen Frankenthaler? M.A. Peers, of course, and what makes Peers’ current offering at Rosamund Felsen so compelling isn’t just the artist’s fearlessness in selecting and combining odd imagery — from philanthropists and CEOs to “found yuppies” and Russian space dogs — but also her skill as a painter. Peers is able not only to ape or point to any number of painting styles, from the likes of Chicago imagist Ed Paschke or psychedelimaster Peter Max to more traditional approaches to figuration, but also to create unexpected, painterly concoctions that match the confliction of their subject matter and induce a kind of gleeful nausea — or is that a nauseating glee? Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., B-4 (Bergamot Station), Santa Monica; Tues.-Sat., 11 a.m.-5:30 p.m.; thru June 7. (310) 828-8488 or www.rosamundfelsen.com.

Takashi Murakami at Blum & Poe

More than a few comparisons have been made, by detractors and fans alike, between Takashi Murakami, whose spectacle of a survey exhibition just closed at the Geffen Contemporary in February, and Andy Warhol. While such comparisons have centered on the artists’ preoccupations with popular culture, factory production and commercialism, what has been overlooked is among the most interesting inclinations the two artists share — the exploration of the possibilities of variation upon theme. A specific room in MOCA’s 2002 Warhol retrospective — hung with three paintings of Elizabeth Taylor, all from the same photo — comes to mind. While the hanging no doubt reinforced the idea of Andy pumping ’em out, it also made one look at the differences a slight change in cropping or positioning could make. That room echoes forward to Blum & Poe, where a current Murakami exhibition includes a room hung with three paintings, all rooted in the same base image of Daruma (a.k.a. Bodhidharma), the 5th-century founder of Zen Buddhism. And in looking at the three, as well as in looking at any one of them — or the group of similar yet different, more abstract compositions in an adjacent room — you see, emerging from beneath the spectacle in this quieter yet more forceful offering, a Murakami deeply invested in subtlety. Blum & Poe, 2754 S. La Cienega Blvd., L.A., Tues.-Sat., 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; thru June 14. (310) 836-2062 or www.blumandpoe.com.

Carmine Iannaccone at SolwayJones

Variation and recurrence are central to Carmine Iannaccone’s latest project at Solway Jones, where the artist, who previously has used layered plywood to simulate landscape, now takes a cue from the sorts of strategies used by artist Allan McCollum. In his “Individual Works” series, McCollum produced thousands of small objects, generally similar in size and shape, and painted the same color in massive lots, but unique in their specifics. Such one-of-a-kind multiples suggested a certain kind of interchangeability of art objects, but they also invited an investment in, and afforded access to, an intimacy and connoisseurship lost in the experience of much contemporary art. Iannaccone does something similar with a collection of objects made of layered plywood —scroll-cut according to templates — and laminated to suggest sedimentary rocks that are then further carved and painted, so as to give each an individual character. The results are simulations and surrogates that, in inviting scrutiny, awaken a kind of awareness, which is little applied to a natural world that has become generic to us. SolwayJones, 5377 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., Tues.-Sat., 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; thru June 7. (323) 937-7354 or www.solwayjonesgallery.com.