Pat O’Neill, “Let's Make a Sandwich”

This exhibition marks the New York debut of O’Neill,a Los Angeles artist and filmmaker, who isn’t particularly well known on this side of the continental United States, even though his career has spanned five decades. His work touches upon a number of strains of West Coast art during the 1960s and 1970s, ranging from the deconstructive film- and photo-collage aesthetics of Bruce Connor and Robert Heinecken (who was O’Neill’s teacher at UCLA in the early 1960s) to the “Finish Fetish” school of sculpture associated with John McCracken and Craig Kauffman. O’Neill’s surreal sculptural tableaux and his rapid-fire abstract films reflect those influences on his efforts, surveyed here in this career primer.