In the galleries, color everywhere, unconventionally applied

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Paint on its own terms. Cornelia Schulz is a venerated abstract artist who taught at UC Davis for three decades, but you wouldn’t know her age from looking at her recent paintings. Sarcastically gloppy and garishly colorful, they are all brag and bluster — grand gesture, stunted by canvases less than a foot square. They are mock-heroic exercises as loaded with irony as any painting of the current moment, even as they seduce formally (though their lusciousness of color and detail) and narratively (with references to landscape and the forces of nature).

Schulz’s paintings are at Patricia Sweetow Gallery (315 Potrero Ave., S.F. dev.patriciasweetow.gallery) through Dec. 16. Sweetow has run galleries for many years, having been pushed around San Francisco and Oakland by the shifting winds of real estate prices and the fads of gallery-going. Now she has opened what she calls a pop-up space, in the former quarters of George Lawson Gallery. She plans to operate at least through July in the small but lively art neighborhood that has sprouted in lower Potrero Hill.