“Golden Ratio”

Hughen, Consumptia (detail), 2007.

Amanda Hughen paints the prettiest germs. Of course, though the San Francisco–based artist gives her recent mixed-media works on drafting film suggestive names like Consumptia (pictured) and Polyviral, their organic forms are unlikely to visit your day-old tacos.

Thanks to their complexity, Hughen’s abstract, biomorphic shapes fascinate. Cell-like structures executed in pencil, ink and paint—primarily in girly hues of pink, purple and turquoise—overlap. The artist works on both sides of her translucent vellum and often layers multiple sheets, embedding a dizzying range of colors and textures in each piece.

The loose emphasis on geometry in “Golden Ratio” places Hughen’s series next to Carter Hodgkin’s superficially similar works on paper. Hodgkin, who lives in New York, also layers different media—in her case, watercolor, gouache and inkjet printing—to create intricate patterns and combines hand-drawing with images from other sources. (Hers are computer-generated; Hughen’s come from architectural templates.) Yet Hodgkin’s trails of dots and spirals evoke physics rather than biology, and their algorithm-based loveliness sometimes seems a little too mechanical and removed from the artist’s hand.

The show’s installation overwhelms a trio of stripe paintings by Andrew Graham, but several process-oriented, semi-sculptural pieces by Scott Gruss get a room to themselves. The best is his undated profile sw., a large-scale grid of straw wrappers precisely arranged so that only their ribbed edges are exposed. Like Hughen’s not-quite-identifiable compositions, Gruss’s white-on-white work ably mines the gray area between two and three dimensions.

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