Mara De Luca | West Coast Paintings

Quint Gallery is thrilled to announce a solo exhibition of recent works by Los Angeles-based painter Mara De Luca. West Coast Paintings, as the title suggests, draws on the unique qualities of her surrounding landscape-- fleeting moments at dusk, glowing suns and nighttime clouds are achieved through considered approaches to color, material, and surface quality.

Inspected further, a number of physical elements alter the structure of these paintings while playing to the artist's theoretical concepts. A strip of copper-plated metal between canvases may catch light like a descending sun’s reflective glean on a building, highlighting the interplay between atmosphere and industry. Scrolls formed by cut canvas reveal untreated surfaces underneath. These ruptures and visual interferences allude to a fractured reality, whereas other paintings, such as Western Sun, behave as pure illusion and artifice when seen from a distance. At closer viewing, this work and others reveal their materiality through layering and surface:

"To me, a painting is like theater: you fall into the illusion as a true believer, all the while aware of the artifice and knowing it's a constructed thing." -Mara De Luca

Informed by a lineage of light-obsessed painters from Caravaggio to Mary Corse, De Luca’s work focuses on the spiritual and emotional qualities of illumination, while operating within art historical movements specific to Southern California, like Light and Space and Conceptualism. 

Mara De Luca received a MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia CA and a BA from Columbia University, Department of Visual Arts, New York NY. De Luca has had solo exhibitions at TOTAH (New York), Edward Cella Art and Architecture (Los Angeles), and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. De Luca is a recipient of the 2019 California  Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists. She has been a lecturer at UC San Diego since 2006. This exhibition will be her third solo exhibition with Quint Gallery.