QuintGallery.com

Mark Quint still remembers his first collaboration with Manny Farber in 1984, when Quint’s gallery was located downtown. Farber was infamous for working up to the last minute, and he finished the show’s final work about an hour before the opening.

“We hauled it upstairs, and it was still totally wet,” Quint recalled. “He had images of seafood, lobsters, mussels, and these were all things Patricia (Patterson, his wife and collaborator) had either cooked or they had bought. And before he ate them, he painted them.”

As was his practice, Farber worked on a flat, horizontal surface and would stage his paintings using tiny figures, scraps of paper, rebar, leaves, vegetables, fish and countless other everyday, mundane items. But sometimes, as he was painting, often right next to the item, a piece of something, perhaps a melon seed or a fish bone, would get caught in the paint and become part of the painting.

Quint Contemporary Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of artwork from the estate of Manny Farber, opening July 23 and running through September 17, 2011. There will be a public reception on Saturday, July 23rd from 6 – 8 PM. Manny Farber began showing at Quint Contemporary Art in 1985, and this will be the seventeenth solo exhibition for the artist at the gallery.

The exhibition, comprised of approximately 20 selected drawings and paintings, will feature key works completed over the course of Farber’s painting career. The works will highlight Farber’s passion for painting, film and the visual world in general. His cultivation of a tabletop working process can be traced from his earliest paintings of the everyday objects on his desk, like cigarettes and candy, to his later paintings with images including everything from art books, rebar and flowers from the garden of his wife, Patricia. He once described his art by saying: “…what I’m doing in paintings is pretty much creating movies. I’m lining up objects and lining up paths through painting, pretty close to the way a movie director makes a movie.” The direction of his painting career will be charted from the mid-1970s to the early-2000s.