Person, place and thing: "The Undiscovered Country," an idiosyncratic show at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, examines the last 40 years of representational painting, with an emphasis on the present

Art in America, Jan, 2005 by Raphael Rubinstein

One of the most stimulating exhibitions I've seen recently is "The Undiscovered Country," a group show of paintings that is at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles until Jan. 16. Although not without its shortcomings, this capsule survey of representational painting over the last 40 years is refreshingly idiosyncratic, mixing together the canonical and the overlooked, the long-deceased and the recently emerged. Curator Russell Ferguson's selection includes 60 works by 23 artists from the U.S. and Europe, with a particular focus on the present. The show also benefits from a thoughtful and elegant installation. Throughout a half-dozen galleries at the Hammer, individual paintings have room to breathe and juxtapositions generally work to the benefit of all. Instead of hanging every canvas by a given artist in the same gallery, Ferguson frequently staggers them throughout the show. Thus, works by the same artist are encountered at more than one point. Thanks to this somewhat unusual sequencing, there is a cumulative effect as perceptions of a given artist's work are altered and enriched while viewers move through the exhibition.

The show's Shakespearean title (taken from Hamlet) can be read in a number of ways, but chiefly it seems to suggest two premises: a) that painting offers access, for both artist and viewer, to some kind of distinct visual realm and b) that the medium is currently in need of fuller examination. Because in Hamlet the "undiscovered country" refers to a realm beyond death, the phrase also evokes the oft-pronounced "death" of painting and the medium's vast afterlife. In any case, it's a usefully ambiguous, intriguingly poetic title.

The exhibition opens with a room equally divided between old and new. On one end of the chronological scale viewers discover a tiny but potent 1964 Gerhard Richter, two painstakingly precise and memorably moody paintings by Vija Celmins (one of a lamp and the other of someone's hand firing a pistol), also from 1964, and a 1968 self-portrait by Fairfield Porter. The Richter is a snapshot apparently clipped from a magazine of two identically dressed little girls, one of whose faces has been painted over with minute white-to-off-white brushstrokes. It's a pocket-size treatise on the vexed relationship between painting and photography, which is, in fact, one of the show's subtexts. (In his wide-ranging catalogue essay, Ferguson makes the familiar argument that with the advent of photography, representation became a problematic issue for painting, and that in the wake of mid-century abstraction, artists began to take another look at the relationship between painting and representation.) The much larger (59 by 45 3/8 inches) Porter shows the middle-aged artist in his orderly studio. Standing in the foreground, dressed in shirtsleeves and tie, Porter is flanked by a painting table and old heating stove. A skylight and picture window supply marvelous backlighting, and on the rear wall is an array of small pictures or sketches that Porter delineates with an assortment of small brushstrokes, conveying genre (portrait, landscape) with an amazing economy. The studio seems calm and uncluttered, a workspace where understatement is the rule, but at the same time the painting is a rich mosaic of light, color and form, with a pictorial complexity that recalls Velazquez's Las Meninas. Two other equally beguiling paintings by Porter, the landscapes Six O'Clock (1964) and Amherst Campus #1 (1969), testify to his range. Although a respected figure in 20th-century American art and the subject of a recent biography and traveling retrospective, Porter has received hardly any attention from the contemporary art world. His surprising and welcome inclusion in this show should help his work gain the wider currency it deserves. (Ferguson also included Porter in a previous show he curated, "In Memory of My Feelings: Frank O'Hara and American Art" [see A.i.A., Feb. '00].)

Making the case for the present moment in the first room are Laura Owens's portrait of a horse, a delicate painting of a ceramic container by Marl Eastman and two figurative canvases by Edgar Bryan. The Owens painting, of a flatly rendered, stylized, prancing horse artfully constrained by the edges of the canvas, is the most forthright work of hers I've yet seen, though its compositional device was explored more radically by Picasso nearly 75 years ago in The Gray Acrobat. It's the only work by Owens in the show. Eastman, a 34-year-old L.A. painter, is represented by four canvases. Using airbrush, spray paint, glitter and acrylic, she depicts subjects ranging from a military operation in Iraq to a piece of Chinese porcelain, in a kind of fuzzy, watercolorish manner. Bryan, who is also 34 and based in L.A., contributes two paintings, The Ledge (2004) and Night in the Alte Pinakothek (2002). The former shows a teenage boy painting an easel picture of a small, nearly leafless potted tree. The branches of the tree stretch out across the canvas, imprisoning the boy and apparently entering into the picture he is painting. In contrast to the crowdedness of The Ledge, the much larger Night in the Alte Pinakothek portrays an enormous room that is empty except for a mime crouching in the foreground. The styles of the two paintings are also different, with The Ledge done in a kind of sketchy, social realist manner that recalls Ben Shahn, and the more verist mime painting evoking Andrew Wyeth, especially because its composition vaguely echoes that of Wyeth's most famous painting, Christina's World.