When the artist known only as "Gronk" took part in his first major museum show at Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art, he painted the figure of a tormented female onto a wall. By the time the exhibit ended, the lady had vanished.

Each day, Gronk had reentered the museum to redo sections of his installation. "Tormenta," a reoccurring character in much of his work, started off near an exit. And the mysterious woman (who never appears facing front) kept edging farther and farther away.

"Eventually, she walked out the back door, dropping her cigarette, so she could continue on her voyage to more shows, different exhibits," says Gronk, who now has painted all 12 walls of the Laguna Art Museum's annex at South Coast Plaza for "Hotel Zombie," running today through Dec. 31.

Paintings that evolve over time are what Gronk does. Movement, metamorphosis and progression are key to the Los Angeles artist, who sees himself as a performance artist, as well as a maker of highly textured, colorful, one-dimensional works.

"The excitement for me is the process, having reoccurring images," he said during a lecture Thursday at the Laguna museum's main site. "I don't tend to do a finished piece. I want them to be open-ended, like a big sketch pad."

Growing up in the barrio, the 35-year-old Gronk (whose name in Brazilian dialect means "to fly"; his full name is Glugio Gronk Nicandro) started out on the move, not stationed in front of a canvas.

Shortly after high school, he co-founded "Asco" a 1970s performance collective based in East Los Angeles, whose young, rebellious members taped people to walls for "instant murals," or staged dinner parties in the middle of the street around traffic islands.

Their work was standard conceptual-performance fodder of the time. But Gronk and friends pushed the edge of the envelope late one night in 1972 after, Gronk says, they had been told by the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that Latinos had no place inside the institution.

"So we spray-canned all the exits and entrances, claiming the museum as our piece," he recalls.

Seventeen years later, Gronk broke through the racial boundary: He was featured in "Hispanic Art in the United States, 30 Contemporary Painters and Sculptors," a major traveling show that made a stop at LACMA.

His approach still hasn't changed much. A sense of continuation and process is evident in "Hotel Zombie," the latest installment of his "Grand Hotel Series."