Katherine Bernhardt: Fruit Salad

The exterior of Venus Over Los Angeles, the new West Coast satellite of Venus Over Manhattan gallery, was painted all Pepto-Bismol pink before last week. Now the side of the building is a sunny mural by New York artist Katherine Bernhardt called Fruit Salad — toucans, fat bananas and flattened cigarettes float across the wall. There’s also an out-of-place interlude in which hammerhead sharks swim around inside a blue rectangle. Especially given the formal-looking grayness of the gallery’s New York headquarters, the mural feels like a comic embodiment of an East Coast stereotype: L.A. as la-la land.