Over the course of his career, Chicago-based artist Gaylen Gerber has consistently pursued a project at the intersection of painting and its historical and architectural contexts. No other painter I can think of, with the notable exception of Daniel Buren, has taken the notion of a painting’s “support” so literally. In previous shows at Daniel Hug, Gerber deployed a large, flatly painted gray “backdrop” of stretched canvas that nearly covered a long wall of the gallery. This was designed to allow for the intervention of other artists—Tom Friedman and Joe Scanlan in 2003; Remy Zaugg, B. Wurtz,

A Walk in the Woods, 2006–2007, depicts a pair of colorful androgynous figures walking side by side through a grove of leafless trees. The minimal treatment of the background is reminiscent of Edvard Munch’s, but Tyson’s use of color is rather different from the Norwegian artist’s; the translucency of her oils often allows for underpainting to show through—here a layer of black beneath the sky’s bright blue. The figures in other works are less readily identifiable as male or female, or even as entirely human. In Dog, 2006–2007, for example, Tyson imagines a bald baby head attached to a brown canine

As an artist and critic, Thomas Lawson (now dean of the School of Art at CalArts) was central to debates about the viability of painting at the turn of the 1980s. Yet his work has seldom been shown on the West Coast, making this recent exhibition of paintings, most of which were produced over the past two years, a rare opportunity to see how his practice and its politics have held up.

Lawson’s new canvases are characterized by deadpan mottled surfaces and muted, at times grating, color combinations. Often based on maps, they render seas and continents as abstract patches of texture and tone.