QuintGallery.com

Robert Irwin’s new work at La Jolla’s Quint Contemporary Art — his first show in a commercial gallery space on the West Coast in three decades — consists mainly of fluorescent light tubes. But it’s important to know that it’s not about the lights.

Sound like a contradiction? On the surface, yes. But not if we take into account the dramatic evolution of Irwin’s art since the 1960s — a body of work that has made him one of the major artists of our time.

Irwin, 81, has worked with an impressive array of media. There are the painted and shaped acrylic surfaces of his ethereal, wall-mounted discs of the late 1960s. Or, the tinted fence he employed in works like “Two Running Violet V-Forms” for UCSD’s Stuart Collection in 1981. Then, there is the vast array of plant life in what is arguably his most famous work for a public place: the Getty Garden in Los Angeles.

Quint Contemporary Art is pleased to exhibit new works by artist Johannes Girardoni. This will be the first solo exhibition for the New York based artist at Quint Contemporary Art. The exhibition opens on October 23rd and will run through November 14th, 2009. There will be a public reception on Friday, October 23rd from 6 to 8PM.

Johannes Girardoni is an Austrian-born, American-based sculptor and installation artist. Girardoni’s works are reductive investigations at the intersection of sculpture and painting, through which he explores the continuously shifting relationship between reality and image. His material vocabulary – found wood, plywood, wax, pigment, light, enamel and plexiglass – and its physical constellation, become both the carrier of an explicitly painterly event, while also being the foundation of an immaterial phenomenon. His orchestration of material and light, presence and absence, things found and things formed, all resist clear fixation, thereby maintaining and creating works with their own non-derivable reality.