ART REVIEW

Strict Focus: A straightforward survey of 27 still lifes by Helen Lundeberg takes viewers on a quick trip through six decades of paintings, drawings and prints. Although no masterpieces are on view at Tobey C. Moss Gallery, plenty of quirky studies and strange finished works make for an exhibition with more than its share of intrigue.

The earliest images displayed, from the 1930s, are tentative and sketchy, suffused with little of the tremulous energy that gives Lundeberg’s long, narrow paintings from the 1940s their psychological charge. “The Pier” (1943) and “Abandoned Easel #4” (1946) resemble the improbable fusion of Salvador Dali’s slick Surrealism and Arthur Dove’s gritty organic abstraction, with a dose of De Chirico thrown in.

“Biological Fantasy,” also from 1946, steals the show, with its two pairs of radiant ganglia frolicking in an abstract landscape under a dazzling night sky.

A full third of the exhibition’s paintings date from the 1940s, suggesting that this decade was the artist’s most productive, in terms of both quantity and quality.

In the 1950s, Lundeberg purged deep space from her images, putting flat expanses of subtly modulated color in its place. By the 1960s, almost every hint of volume and depth was subsumed in stark expanses of taupe, lavender, aqua, rusty yellow, silvery white and other pastel-tinted colors that subsequently have come to be associated with Santa Fe decorations.

Over the next two decades, the 89-year-old artist refined and adjusted her technique, sometimes adding a touch of texture to an image, such as “Shell & Rock” (1979), or locking every part of the painting into the picture plane, as in “Red Pears” (1987).

The sense of stasis in these works is sometimes suffocating, and they suggest that Lundeberg’s interests had shifted to out-and-out abstraction. An example or two of those works would have nicely rounded out a show that is a bit too strict in its focus on still lifes.

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* Tobey C. Moss Gallery, 7321 Beverly Blvd., (213) 933-5523, through Oct. 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.