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Art Review: ‘Cindy Kolodziejski: Portraits of Sorts and Curiosities’ at Frank Lloyd Gallery

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Over the last 20 years, Cindy Kolodziejski has shown herself to be an artist with a great eye for detail, a great love of odd juxtapositions and a great talent for fusing two-dimensional pictures and three-dimensional objects in perversely beautiful sculptures.

In “Cindy Kolodziejski: Portraits of Sorts and Curiosities,” the L.A. artist downplays sculptural volume to zero in on details. This leaves visitors free to find — or create — our own juxtapositions among Kolodziejski’s consummately crafted works, all but two of which were made this year.

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The centerpiece is a cluster of 65 small pieces, tastefully arranged on a wine-red wall. The imagery covers lots of ground, including words (“war of wealth,” “drug” and “joker”), animals (fish, birds and camels) and body parts (nipples, eyes and genitals). Silhouettes of children and shadows cast by hands clasped to resemble real and imaginary beasts also figure prominently. A smattering of jesters, devils and regular folks rounds out the rogue’s gallery.

The frames Kolodziejski uses are a mismatched mélange of thrift-store finds and online discoveries, including some made of antique piano keys, others carved from tortoise shells and still others elaborately cast from iron, silver and brass or cheaply made of plastic, wood and tin.

Kolodziejski prints some of her images on fabric and adds embroidered details. Most, however, are found pictures she has made into custom decals and affixed to earthenware surfaces with various glazes.

It’s hard to distinguish between the found and the fabricated. Among the best are the most three dimensional: a pig’s snout, a turkey’s head and four lifelike human nipples, each protruding from a round frame like a fleshy bull’s-eye.

A cluster of 12 similarly intimate pieces invites more mixing and matching. In the entryway, two tabletop sculptures from 2009 stand apart from such promiscuous intermingling. Decisive and confident, they show Kolodziejski to have more than one trick up her sleeve.

-- David Pagel

Frank Lloyd Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 264-3866, through July 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.franklloyd.com

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Images, from top: Cindy Kolodziejski, installation view; ‘Pig Snout.’ Credit: Frank Lloyd Gallery

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