George Lawson Gallery

For the July show, our 11th in the Culver City space, we are presenting paintings by gallery veterans and a few newcomers to the program, works that in some manner address the kind of turbulence that occurs when streams converge. Angela Baker, a native of Philadelphia now living and working in San Francisco, employs a matte black calligraphy reminiscent of Franz Kline against simple colored grounds. Sara Bright, returning to the West Coast after a year in New York, mixes psychological narrative and richly tactile abstraction. Stephan Fritsch, a German artist living and working in Salzburg, comes out of the European dialogue about fundamental color painting, but pushes the boundaries of this genre to allow complex gestural overlays. Masaru Kurose from Kobe, Japan, combines hesitant, premeditated line with spontaneous marking on transparent supports. Erin Lawlor, a British painter living and working in Paris, uses dry, close-valued palettes with freely looping marks that create complex spatial relationships. Santa Monica-based Julia Schwartz works wet on wet with nuanced marking akin to Guston's abstract expressionist works. Painter Marie Thibeault who lives and works in San Pedro stacks turgid layers of openly networked planes. Los Angeles painter Catherine Tirr emulates cellular structures and marine currents in her paintings. All share a sophisticated understanding of how an image can be captured in the paint itself.