QuintGallery.com

Nudie playing cards and pole-twisting dancers doused in blacklight paint? It’s all in a night’s work for New York artist Ryan McGinness.

The international art darling just wrapped up an action-packed month in Los Angeles, where he painted two major murals and pimped his impressive body of work at seven locations—including a pop-up strip club at the Standard. Now it’s on to San Diego, where he’ll leave his semipermanent mark on the 130-by-30 back wall of La Jolla’s Hotel Parisi this summer.

It’s a massive coup for Murals of La Jolla, a project that’s putting up wall art all over town (no word yet on the exact duration, but the outdoor works will be on display for at least a couple of years). McGinness’ huge triptych, an eye-popping horizontal collage of simplistic, Picasso-esque female figures in fluorescent colors against a velvety black background, belongs to the artist’s ongoing Women series.

“I believe the search is more important than the Holy Grail,” says New York–based artist Ryan McGinness, whose vivid paintings and works on paper are collected by major institutions, like the Museum of Modern Art and the Cincinnati Art Museum. McGinness is best known for his hypercolor silkscreen canvases that break down symbols taken from urban signage and advertising into their most graphic forms. For his “Women” series, the 39-year-old has turned his focus to the most classic of painterly subjects: the female figure.

The series is a departure for McGinness, who started out in Virginia Beach, Virginia, drawing logos on T-shirts for his skateboarder friends. While his work is now collected by the industry’s boldface names, including Charles Saatchi and Jeffrey Deitch (his former dealer), he has never lost his renegade spirit. In 2003, he put on a show titled “Sponsorship” at his friend Shepard Fairey’s gallery, where he asked corporate sponsors to give money in exchange for seeing their logo hung on the wall.

As various species of artists go, Ryan McGinness seems happy playing the party animal.

In New York not so long ago he threw a party in his studio every Friday night for 50 weeks in a row. (“50 parties. 50 themes. 50 weeks” his tag line went, with themes ranging from “search party” to “prom.”) In Miami this last December he staged a show of glow-in-the-dark nude paintings at a strip club. So when it came time to think about exhibiting his work in L.A., the 39-year-old with the energy of a 19-year-old did not limit himself to galleries.

Along with planning four different gallery shows here from late May through June — featuring paintings, sculptures, works on paper and a high-concept project — he has planned “a barbecue lecture” for the Giant Robot store on Sawtelle Boulevard, art installations for both Standard hotels in L.A., and a three-night drawing performance at the hotel’s Sunset Strip location that begins June 1.