S.F. gets better end of Hosfelt show with N.Y.

Several San Francisco galleries have ventured bicoastal operations, but I cannot recall any presenting concurrent linked exhibitions here and in New York, the way Hosfelt does with "Einfluss: 8 From Düsseldorf."

For once, San Francisco gets the better end of the split. Even disregarding the cachet both shows garner from all the represented artists having some link with Düsseldorf's vaunted Kunstakademie, the San Francisco selection makes a more powerful impression than the New York lot.

Bernard Lokai's "Landscape Block S" (2010) forms an array of 18 small canvases, each apparently inspired by, or chancing to suggest, a view of land, sea or sky. The fluency and range of techniques involved recalls the style-shifting of Gerhard Richter, one of the Kunstakademie's most famous graduates and teachers.

But Lokai's work exudes ambivalence about his own dexterity that does not seem to trouble Richter, or that he discharges with irony.

Stefan Kürten, Driss Oadahi, Birgit Jensen, Stefan Ettlinger and Jutta Haeckel distance themselves from the content and touch in their pictures by resorting to various processes or preset structures of visual information. All of their strategies recall to some extent another famous predecessor from the Kunstakademie, Sigmar Polke (1941-2010).

Yet, unlike Polke, all of these painters seem to want to involve viewers sensuously as well as intellectually in their works' details. Haeckel's "Network" (2010) appears to overlay on a mottled ground an image of a decorated tree with the veins of a city map, producing a composite that resists every effort to penetrate it.

Cornelius Völker has found a humorous and timely image with which to mobilize his medium and technique. His "Sink 1" (2008) uses cyclonic brushwork to describe something fluid - could that deep ruby be blood? - spiraling into a sink drain.

Forakis at Togonon: Togonon Gallery honors the memory of Northern California sculptor Peter Forakis (1927-2009) with a sketch for a retrospective incorporating finished works in steel, drawings and documentation.

The documentation includes photographs of the artist provided by his family, a fascinating 1967 film that he shot, recording his immense outdoor piece "Atlanta Gateway," and remarkably persuasive "photographic maquettes" that digitally envision large-scale pieces sited in various cities.

The film, shot mostly from a moving vehicle, shows the rangy, spindly sculpture appearing to shift in form between tangent volumes and conjoined planes as the camera orbits it distantly. Lots of American sculptors had begun thinking big by the late '60s, but few besides Forakis had yet formulated work with a vehicular perspective in mind.

Perhaps partly in response to Richard Serra's exploration of how to make sculpture stand without fastening or armature, Forakis devised self-supporting structures of metal planes slotted together in ways that still look both obvious and inevitable.

When Forakis did resort to welding, he brought as much rigor to composition as he could. How to make constructed abstract sculpture look more than merely arbitrary or like a design exercise has been a recurrent problem since the earliest works in this vein by artists such as V.I. Tatlin (1885-1953) and Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956).

Forakis' "Aziz" (1981) abstracts a human stride - an idea he revisited several times - into a torqued bridge of steel slabs. Like the sculpture of Tony Smith (1912-1980), its straightforward appearance disguises precise inner complexities that only careful study in the round can discover.

Art/Paper at Cain Schulte: An anthology show may offer the artists in it less exposure than they might like, but it may remind visitors, as Cain Schulte's "Magna Carta - Art/Paper" does, of contemporary art's wealth of possibilities.

Several names here will be familiar.

Ann Weber turns in two characteristic sculptures of thatched cardboard that might serve as abstract monuments to recycling. Brad Brown offers a dense wall collage of small, connected drawings that counts as an exhibition in itself.

But newcomers to the Bay Area exhibition scene also figure in: See Joan Linder's ink drawing "Blue Rope" (2005), which slowly unveils its inflammatory subject, and the almost cinematic "Extraordinary Rendition" (2008), which Will Marino somehow fashioned from a paper dartboard.

Einfluss: 8 From Düsseldorf: Paintings and sculpture. Through Feb. 5. Hosfelt Gallery, 430 Clementina St., S.F. (415) 495-5454, www.hosfeltgallery.com.

Peter Forakis: Slots and Strides: Exploration of the Cube: Sculpture, drawings and documentation. Through Jan. 15. Togonon Gallery, 77 Geary St., S. F. (415) 398-5572, wwwtogonongallery.com.

Magna Carta - Art/Paper: Works on or of paper by 20 artists. Through Jan. 18. Cain Schulte Gallery, 251 Post St., S.F. (415) 543-1550, www.cainschulte.com.

E-mail Kenneth Baker at kennethbaker@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle