‘Funk Art,' Psychedelia, and Post-Punk Sensibility

The varied artists in the George Adams Gallery stable have in common that they vigorously eschew minimalism and that they entertain."Outside," a loosely-themed groupshow following "Inside," provides a nice sample of the gallery's artists, who include realists and painters associated with 1960s West Coast "funk art," among others.

The 22 works in "Outside" range in date between 1965 and 2007, and the artists' birth dates range between 1922 (Joyce Treiman) and 1975 (Amer Kobaslija). Ms. Treiman, who died in 1991, can be counted among the West Coasters, thoughherworkdifferssignificantly from the West Coast art of Roy De Forest and Robert Arneson, the show's two best-known artists. Ms. Treiman stands out here for her impressionist sensibility: She examines light effects in oil paintings — "Sur La Cote" (1987) and "Santa Monica I" (1988) — with big sandy shores for foregrounds, and buildings and sky in back, with special attention to the changing Southern California light at different times of day. Sandy Winters, who comes from California but works in New York, makes pictures as different as can be in motive and mood from Ms. Treiman's. "Against the Tide" (2007), with fantastically rendered vegetation outside of vignettes encapsulated within glass or otherwise gleamingly transparent orbs, seems to typify Ms. Winters's work. It's a lush illustrational style that finds a more whimsical expression in the art of Californian James Barsness, whose mixed-media "Runaway Train" (2007) is like a powerfully composed pop-surreal greeting-card image, by which I do not mean to disparage the picture.

A leading "funk art" practitioner who died this year, Roy De Forest, has two works in the show. A whimsical pastel and charcoal on paper, "Untitled (Canoe)" from 1975, indicates the artist's probable debt to Miró and even more to Saul Steinberg, and the painting "A Bird in Hand" (1965) exemplifies De Forest's signature style which combines Tibetan tangka paintings with Zap Comix resulting in hallucinatory 1960s pastiche. A framed central image, of a duck and boy floating on blue water, itself floats on crisscrossing ribbons of Tibetan red that divide the canvas into four landscape vignettes. While clearly De Forest borrowed from naive art, it's his sophistication that holds these pictures together and makes them so entertaining (especially in measured doses). The show's other well-known West Coaster, Robert Arneson, gives us something altogether different, though no less unconventional, in his 1967 watercolor "Alice House," which places a precisely drafted gray house amid ferociously swirling gray fields, with a background sky of pastel blue, green, yellow, and pink horizontal bands, the softest of colors used to almost shocking effect. Arneson, who died in 1992, was well known as a sculptor, a good one whose works sometimes succumbed to willful unconventionality. In this show, a glazed ceramic (1966) of the same "Alice House," displays it in a kind of melty, gingerbread-house way.

Chicagoan James Valerio's photorealism ("Pruning," 2005) is both technically astonishing and creepy. His work is much like the sculptures of Duane Hanson, the sort of realer-than-real kind of thing that comes off as more surreal than anything by De Forest. I prefer Brooklynite Andrew Lenaghan's nuanced realism. Mr. Lenaghan has shown us cityscapes, views of cluttered rooms, garages, overgrown backyards, and water tanks, tugs, viaducts, factories — and even the Gowanus Canal. He deftly — perhaps as no other painter has done — combines photorealist with Ashcan School sensibilities in his records of urban detritus. A few years ago, he made memorable images of ruins at the decommissioned Fort Tilden at the western tip of the Rockaway peninsula; the nearby surf got to him. He masterfully renders the surf — untypical subject matter for Mr. Lenaghan — in six images shown here, including the large-scale "Rockaway Surf" (2007). Surf, ever in motion, doesn't yield to photorealism; it requires a different sort of realism, one that's willing to let the water whoosh by, and focuses on the sometimes minute, sometimes dramatic color changes cast by changing light on sky, sea, and sand. Last year, when Mr. Lenaghan painted the stagnant water of the Gowanus Canal, he got its slick patina just right. But I suspect the wily surf transfixed this artist and may mark a pivotal moment in an already distinguished career (he is only in his early 40s).

The youngest artist, who by dint of real estate may be said to dominate the show, Bosnian-born, New York-based Amer Kobaslija, gives us his "Newsstand Series," including five oil paintings done between 2003 and 2005, and a wood sculpture from 2007. The images neatly, though unsettlingly, evoke the urban flotsam of posted bills, graffiti, piled papers, and scattered boxes on and surrounding closed New York sidewalk newsstands. It's the Ashcan School updated to a post-punk sensibility.

Until September 15 (525 W. 26th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-564-8480).