Museums - Los Angeles Times

The Orange County Museum of Art's Biennial -- CB08 for short -- includes 54 artists and collectives. Most invoke social and political subjects, themes that are always present in art but that take on an urgency in this moment of national elections and economic collapse. CB08 was organized by guest curator Lauri Firstenberg, director of the nonprofit space LAXART in Culver City. She chose a group of artists -- including Andrea Bowers, Sam Durant, Morgan Fisher, Tony Labat, Daniel J. Martinez and several others -- whose work she believes has been formative for many of the younger artists in the show. As a whole it is firmly positioned against the proliferation of sleek, big-ticket, anonymously fabricated art (C.K.). OCMA, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Wed., Fri.-Sun., 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thu., 11 a.m.-8 p.m.; closed Mon., Tue.; ends March 15. (949) 759-1122.

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Louise Bourgeois Prison can be liberating. At least, so suggests this fascinating 60-year retrospective of paintings, drawings, installations and -- most compelling -- sculptures by the New York artist. The incarceration of Bourgeois, now 96, has been psychic. Her famous personal story -- growing up after World War I in a comfortable French household with a governess who was, to her mother and siblings' agonized knowledge, also her father's mistress -- gave Bourgeois a deep reservoir of conflicted feelings about sex and the sexes, on which her work has steadily drawn. The show's first singular achievement is a large 1967 sculpture titled "Sleep II," a fat, blunt, flaccid but potentially dynamic phallus carved from a large block of pristine white marble and resting on a low pedestal made from a chunky pair of wooden beams. Brancusi is there, and so are Minimalists such as Carl Andre and Post-Minimalists such as Eva Hesse and Bruce Nauman. But so is Michelangelo, his iconic marble figure of a heroic David here denatured and demythologized. Bourgeois was 56 when she carved it. Other nearby works in plaster, latex and bronze from the 1960s demonstrate a mature artist who is also attuned to art's newest developments. The sculptures in this gallery set the ambitious bar for the rest of the exhibition (C.K.). Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., L.A. Mon. and Fri., 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sat. and Sun., 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; Thu., 11 a.m.-8 p.m.; closed Tue.-Wed.; ends Jan. 25. (213) 626-6222. Just before cameras transformed the Italian countryside into a 3-D postcard that tourists still love to visit, painters from the rest of Europe did their damnedest to capture the magic of the landscape. Without the benefits of photography, they made images the old-fashioned way: traipsing across the rugged terrain, setting up easels in out-of-the-way places and getting down to work in oils on canvas. "Sur le motif: Painting in Nature around 1800" takes viewers back to this time before photographs, TV and movies, when looking at hand-painted pictures of faraway places was nearly as thrilling as traveling there -- and a whole lot easier. Installed in a single gallery, its 29 paintings highlight the freedom 16 painters found in a seemingly simple format: realistic pictures of trees, streams and valleys, some featuring ancient ruins, rustic towns and people passing by, and others so far off the beaten track that the landscapes seem to be one step from Eden: lush, unspoiled, at peace (D.P.). Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, L.A. Tue.-Thu. and Sun., 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 10 a.m.-9 p.m.; closed Mon.; ends March 8. (310) 440-7300.

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