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

Far more successful is the inclusion of four works from the early 1980s by Thomas Lawson. Based on photos from tabloid newspapers, each painting is a 48-inch-square canvas filled with the head of a child, except in the case of Happy to Be Alive (1982), which measures 48 by 96 and accommodates two heads (a woman and a girl, both smiling). Working within a narrow range of hue and value in each painting and combining neatly rendered features with a noticeable allover pattern of thin brushstrokes, Lawson gently transforms these photojournalist images into visually striking paintings. At first glance, this seems like a Warholian exercise, yet Lawson's images of a battered child or a mother and daughter who have just escaped some undisclosed peril avoid the icy voyeurism of Warhol's tabloid-based paintings. For those in quest of Warholian thrills, hanging on the wall opposite the Lawsons were two of Richard Prince's recent Nurse paintings. Prince had been flailing around in the medium of painting for years before finally discovering, in these slick, gorgeous concoctions, a way to make the best use of his knack for pop-culture borrowings and his severe technical limitations as a painter.

Now, Lawson is hardly a virtuoso of the brush, but in the context of this show his tamped-down painting style and focus on detail in works such as Don't Hit Her Again (1981) make him look like a precursor to Tuymans. At the time he made these paintings, the Scottish-born Lawson, currently based in L.A. but then living in New York, sought, as both a painter and a critic, to reconcile faith in the viability of painting and a politicized concern with the power of mass media. Although his influential article "Last Exit: Painting" (Artforum, Oct. '81) is probably required reading for every survey course that covers '80s art, his paintings have been mostly overlooked. They don't deserve to be. As they engage in an intellectual critique of the news media, they also convey a sense of sympathy, a tender concern, for those who fall haphazardly into its clutches. Ferguson deserves credit not merely for including Lawson in the show but for going to the trouble of gathering four of his early '80s paintings. A more timid curator might have hung one as a token gesture; the presence of four canvases side by side really lets the viewer engage with Lawson's intentions and achievement. It is bold curatorial choices like this that make "The Undiscovered Country" such a worthwhile experiment.

"The Undiscovered Country" is on view at the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles [Oct. 3 2004-Jan. 16, 2005]. The accompanying catalogue includes an essay by curator Russell Ferguson.

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