Wilshire Center

Group shows that represent each artist by one or two works tend to be unjust to the participants. Struggling against that limitation is a group show of New Yorkers who work in the Abstract Expressionist tradition but aim to be more cerebral. Sounds a little like wanting your cake and eating it too, and these works show the strain. The show forces a common denominator on works that really should be viewed as separate aesthetics.

Mary Heilman, whose work is the most geometric of the lot, makes a shaped canvas from two overlapping squares. In a loose, free hand that’s clearly meant to short circuit a strict geometric reading, she paints a turquoise and white checkerboard fenced on the left by a sweeping royal blue arc. Craig Fisher’s two canvases are perhaps the strongest, building layer on layer to achieve backgrounds of vaporous blue or yellow whose depth is countered by hard- edge squares filled with agitated brush strokes. In “On Transience,” Cora Cohen visually walks us through the notion of transformation as the piece reveals a pink stain and raises it to a gnarled skein of thick impastoed color.

Perhaps least convincing are the metal sculptures of Alan Saret. Formed of methodically coiled wire propped up vertically like a cockeyed haystack, “Mount L” gives us an Expressionism that reads as more haphazard than metered. (Saxon-Lee Gallery, 7525 Beverly Blvd., to Dec. 31.)