This Saturday, the Jonathan LeVine Gallery opens exhibitions of art by three California artists showing their work in New York for the first time.

Left to right: The Last Judgement, by Alex Gross; We Are In This Together, by The Date Farmers; Glamour Panel 2, by Erik Mark Sandberg. Courtesy of Jonathan LeVine Gallery.

Mysteries and Manners presents the dreamlike art of Alex Gross, a blend of fairy tale, allegory, and pop culture references that is at once highly realistic and eerily fantastic. With imagery drawn from both Asian and Western influences, Gross's paintings present a world populated by traditional Japanese figures in kimonos and lost-looking Victorian dandies.

In an interview with Morgan Slade of Chronicle Books on the publication of The Art of Alex Gross (Chronicle, 2007), the Pasadena-based artist said, "Before 1998 I was doing commercial work and was totally fed up, but I really didn't know what direction to go with my work. So, going to Japan in '98 for the first time and seeing all the amazing visual stuff there rekindled the excitement and interest I had as a kid. I bought a wonderful medicine packaging book, and a great sci-fi movie poster book, along with some other stuff that I brought back. I now had hundreds of pages of incredibly inspiring imagery that was all new to me. So it was a starting point, a creative rebirth, so to speak."

Erik Mark Sandberg is a Los Angeles-based artist. His unique hybrid of styles and mixture of mediums incorporates 3-D digital polygon models, printmaking, photography, drawing, collage, and painting. Mark Murphy, of Murphy Design, says, “He constructs complex narratives out of bits of digital bytes, painted surface, print making techniques and geometric scrawl. Erik’s unique style and oversized canvases have earned him many opportunities to exhibit his work, from Miami Art Basel to Melbourne, Australia.”

In The Equilibrium of Glamour, Sandberg integrates digitally rendered human and animal figures in a composite of traditional and non-traditional media that reflects the disconnection of contemporary society from its greater organic environment.

After meeting in the desert of Coachella Valley at a local art gallery in 1998, artists Armando Lerma and Carlos Ramirez arrived on the Los Angeles art scene in 2001. Carlo McCormick of Paper magazine says, "The New Image Art Gallery promised them a show if they called themselves the Date Farmers -- presumably because Lerma's father owned a date farm where Ramirez worked. Their art has all the psychotropic genius, working-class vigor and native guile of a lowrider customized by a shaman. Their work is broadly expressive of their home-as-diaspora sensibility, with a healthy admiration of the cultural traditions and social politics of their Mexican-American heritage: raucous colors, tattooed cholos, scavenged traditions and Dumpster-diving detritus, moving from Oaxacan sign painting and zocalo street life to comics and graffiti."

The Crying Playboy features a series of mixed media work incorporated into a site-specific installation through which the collaborators explore topical issues such as immigration and global environmentalism. They are currently working on pieces for exhibitions later this year at the Oakland Museum of Art and the Laguna Art Museum..

The opening reception at Jonathan LeVine Gallery is Saturday, April 5, from 7:00 to 9:00 pm. The exhibitions run through May 3, 2008.