Wayne White, I Fell 37 Miles To Earth 100 Years Ago. Marty Walker Gallery. Feb 20 – Mar 20.

What’s so great about Marty Walker is that she never balks at mixing things up, trying different approaches to the same-old, white box gallery routine. The gallery’s recent downsize left her with less space to play with (still missing the always compelling Project Room) but she has managed to embrace her little exhibition room to good effect, often employing more ambitious exhibition strategies than her Design District gallery counterparts who have four times the space, proving both that necessity is the mother of invention and that good design is a product of constraint.

For this exhibition, Marty Walker has painted the walls a deep burgundy for L.A. artist Wayne White’s work: found lithographs of landscape paintings (think wood-paneled tract house living room attempts at sophistication) that the artist has graffitied with quirky phrases in pastel-colored, pop-art font and framed in gilded or wood composite frames. His work is hung floor-to-ceiling on a single wall of the gallery in Victorian salon-style, romantic much-ness (save a few smaller works on the side walls). During the opening, we all crammed together staring at this wall in an upward gaze, everyone politely squeezing past each other to view the work, like tourists in the Louvre jockeying to see the some art historical staple. It was a shoulder-rubbing experience that broke down the sometimes isolated viewing of a gallery experience.

Wayne White’s hilarious work helped too. Phrases like “Too Much to Look At” painted in stretched-out, smashed together, hard-to-read letters across a lithograph of an idyllic little pond in a meadow, or a misty landscape with horses that gallop on a ribbon of letters that read “Look How Hot This Is” play with the inherent tackiness of the painted scenes he graffities and the faux sophistication they herald. Through his quippy phrases, Wayne White plays the part of wife beater-wearing, water-bed-rocking, porn-star-wannabe art critic, his curt turns of phrase not so much a reduction of a painting style as an hilarious embellishment of one. Lucia Simek

Virgil Grotfeldt, Memories and Transformations. Holly Johnson Gallery. Feb 20 – Mar 20.

Virgil Grotfeldt (1948-2009), The Shape of Things to Come, 2003 (Photo: Courtesy Holly Johnson Gallery)

Full disclosure: I entered Holly Johnson’s exhibition of work by Virgil Grotfeld with some bias. Some of his work here consists of rich, deep colored flower motifs on recovered antique office paper work: accounting ledgers, topographical maps. I spent a sabbatical of sorts these last three years working in the accounting department of a commercial real estate firm, and developed a fascination with accounting that borders on fetish: the baroque beauty of its complex form, symmetry, and completeness; the painstaking, almost masochistic devotion of its practitioners. So I found myself staring past Grotfeld’s painted variations on paper and fixating on the paper as artifact. There were the marks made in the daily grind – the numbers that corrected company’s books (the paper was headed “journal entries”), so vital for the function of business, so absurd and meaningless in the de-contextualized gallery setting. And yet these seemed to be a part of what Grotfled is saying in these pieces – a play on utility and beauty, antiquity and the new mark upon it.  Peter Simek

Main Image: Wayne White, I Fell 37 Miles To Earth 100 Years Ago (Installation shot). Photo: Courtesy Marty Walker Gallery