Not afraid to traffic in the grotesque, the unseemly, the romantic and the comical, Western Project maintains a province for newcomers and quiet surprises.

Housed in a storefront amid restaurants and hardware stores on Culver City’s Main Street, the gallery is a short drive from the heavily trekked La Cienega Boulevard. The distance gives Western Project’s program a chance to cultivate a homegrown feel, and to take risks with little-knowns and unknowns free from MFA hype. These risks have been well worth taking: Many of the artists on the gallery's roster are currently taking the art world by storm. The late Tom of Finland, who, with graphite and paper, created homoerotic fantasies of X-ray vision and hyper-stylized anatomies, is now represented in the contemporary-drawings collection at MoMA; a pair of Eric Freeman’s luminous abstract paintings (think neon lights at night, with a touch of Rothko and Ad Reinhardt) have a permanent home in the Saatchi Collection. Recent Western Project solo exhibitions have included the haunting craftsmanship of Patrick Lee’s composite outlaws and Kris Chatterson’s furiously charged brushstrokes. —Melissa Lo