Peter Frank

Achille Perilli

Achille Perilli, Marc Trujillo

Peter Frank
Italy produced its own generation of post-war abstract expressionists, but, logically enough, their work resembled mid-century Italian design more than it did New York action painting. Achille Perilli, for instance, evolved out of Futurism as much as Cubism, Symbolism as much as Surrealism, Matisse as much as Picasso, Klee as......
Manfred Menz

''Contrary to the Laws of Nature,'' Lawrence Carroll and Pasha Rafat

Peter Frank
“Contrary to the Laws of Nature” at Sarah Lee Artworks & Projects brings together five L.A. artists preoccupied with the social perception of the natural environment, ranging from Mitchell Friedman’s painterly expressionist-symbolist rhapsodies — the individual’s romance with nature — to the altered photographs of Manfred Menz, subjecting familiar topographies......
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Fair Games

Peter Frank
It’s art-fair season in L.A., bringing forth an eruption of gallery-filled trade fairs that brings the art world to Santa Monica — well, mostly to Santa Monica. And it’s not quite the whole art world; that semidemi-monde convened en masse in Miami last month and will do so again in......
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''Addition/Reduction,'' Mary Jones

Peter Frank
“Addition/Reduction” at Gail Harvey brings together nine artists who may or may not use collage or assemblage, but who work in a spirit of intricate assembly, potent juxtaposition and sensuous texture. The work of Mary Stone, Franklin Liegel and Doug Trump is made of paint and nothing but, yet still......
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Masquerade, Long Exposures

Peter Frank
Photo shows — good ones — crowd L.A.’s museums at present; two of modest proportions but great ambition should not be missed, even though they end this Sunday. In “Masquerade: Role Playing in Self-Portraiture,” the work of 30 photographers, all drawn from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Audrey......
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Skin, Kaz Oshiro and Dan Douke

Peter Frank
The three painter-draftsmen in “Skin,” on view at Klapper Gallery, address themselves to the appearance of the human body, its sheath and façade rather than its heft and volume. Peter Liashkov’s renditions of more or less naked people play off his considerable academic skills, skewing toward expressionist distortion without losing......
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Lawrence Gipe

Peter Frank
The modes of entertainment Lawrence Gipe refers to in the title of his series “Zirkus und Varieté” were the circus and cabaret performances of early-20th-century Middle Europe. As such, the images Gipe lifts from vintage photographs and publications, ren­dering the performers in action but silhouetted against inky black backgrounds, are......
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Coleen Sterritt, Jeff Soto

Peter Frank
Coleen Sterritt informs the macho medium of wood sculpture with a tempering humor and an almost self-parodying embrace of furniture. Enmeshing banal things like stools and dowels and wood chips in her almost tornado-like constructions, Sterritt tames the concatenations more than they might seem, directing their energies into decorous orbits......
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Manuela Friedmann, Valerie Green, Eileen Cowin

Peter Frank
Manuela Friedmann practices a kind of maximized minimalism that owes at least as much to “traditional” European geometric painting as it does to pared-down American cool. In simplifying Mondrian and complicating Marden, Friedmann’s canvases radiate Zen lushness, their intricately balanced areas of warm, restrained color fitting into each other eccentrically......
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Pictures From the Past

Peter Frank
Though the achievements of Constable and Turner couldn’t quite be matched, they honed other English painters’ regard for the limpid atmosphere and picturesque settings of their own sod. Aptly named, Benjamin Williams Leader ranked near the top of the late-19th-century Constabulary, celebrating the Midlands and Wales with a perfect blend......