Still hanging around town after Art Los Angeles Contemporary? Arriving early for the LA Art Book Fair? Here are some highlights of the city’s current gallery scene.Thomas Kovachevich at Tif Sigfrids, through February 6 (1507 Wilcox Avenue)What Corten steel is to Richard Serra, black corrugated plastic is to Kovachevich. That might sound like a limp rallying cry, but you’d be surprised how this lo-fi material can perform when cut and arrayed into properly conceived constructions. In some pieces it becomes an inky monochrome, a 99-cent-store Ad Reinhardt. Elsewhere, it is sliced into circles, guillotine-blade wedges, or lightning bolts that are affixed to the wall or dangle from cords like geometric mobiles.Calvin Marcus and Evan Holloway at David Kordansky Gallery, both through March 26 (5130 W. Edgewood Place)This show finds the Marcus struggling to fill an epic expanse of real estate with work that might have thrived in more intimate confines. A series of kitschy shirts dry-cleaned at various establishments are hung, in plastic bags and ornamented with stapled receipts, as readymades. The joke wears thin and certainly doesn’t merit its own hallway space. In an accompanying room, huge oil-crayon and Flashe paintings depict airplanes, skillets, books, and animals floating in blank space. On small sheets of paper, the images would be thrilling; stretching them into eight-foot-square canvases seems like a crass marketing maneuver. The space conforms a bit better to Holloway’s funky, funny sculptures: a stack of fleshy bronze heads with lightbulb noses; a smattering of tropical plants preening under fake heat lamps, the whole composed of fiberglass, epoxy resin, aqua-resin, cardboard, and the like; and “Landscape,” which uses plaster, steel, and batteries to create a shape reminiscent of sea fronds or perhaps some oceanic beast’s greedy tentacles.Julia Rommel at Overduin & Co, through March 5 (6693 Sunset Boulevard)The artist creates her compositions, with their fields of color and creased surfaces, by stretching, folding, and restretching canvases until they find their final form. Some of them feature strips of pigment holding a frame around a central vacancy, à la Jo Baer’s early work. But Rommel’s real debt is to Richard Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park” series, a body of abstraction that she seems to be happily, messily dancing around and through.Jose Lerma and Josh Reames at Luis de Jesus, through March 6 (2685 S La Cienaga Boulevard)After a busy three weeks working in situ, this painterly duo unveils an epic collaborative effort, with paintings that combine Reames’s astute digital-inflected renderings and Lerma’s skinny-airbrush mastery. The narrative underpinning should resonate with any collector deep-pocketed enough to acquire the massive effort: It’s all about the Cayman Islands, a “Caribbean paradise and tax haven with a history of piracy,” according to press materials.“Spaghetti Code” at Viewing Room, through February 8 (3010 N Coolidge Avenue)This group show is hosted in a by-appointment space within artist Joe Riehsen’s studio. It includes a large-scale painting by Despina Stokou—who keeps evolving the way she melds collaged, chopped-and-diced text with heroic and colorful abstract gestures—as well as tiny geometric compositions by Alain Biltereyst (I literally cannot get enough of these things), frenetic work by Nick Schutzenhofer, and great mixed-media pieces from Samantha Bittman. For the latter, the artist created her own textiles, then augmented and built upon elements of the patterned weave with paint.
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