QuintGallery.com

Artist Jean Lowe has a knack for work that’s laugh-out-loud witty, from her wordplay-based papier-máché books to her more recent series of large-scale paintings that mash-up over-the-top Old World interiors and the jumbled aisles of big-box retail stores.
I’m poking pretty hard fun at our society’s self-absorption and consumerism,” Lowe says, stepping into the large metal barn that serves as her studio at the Encinitas home she shares with her husband, artist and UCSD Prof Kim MacConnel, and their fluffy cockapoo, Ceci.
Last month, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego acquired a sculpture by Jean Lowe for its permanent collection. “Jean Lowe’s work reflects the wit of California Conceptualism even as it aligns with other historical references, such as pop art and minimalism,” says MCASD Director Hugh Davies.
In April, she’ll be back at Quint Contemporary Art for a solo show, a follow-up to her crowd pleasing pop-up shop for the gallery at last year’s San Diego Art Fair, where she also exhibited her paintings. “And then I’ll take a breather,” she says with a hopeful smile.
Lowe–who is 6 feet, 3 inches tall and effortlessly lovely–slices open a box containing some of the goods she peddled at her “Discount Barn,” a concept she first came up with about a year ago.

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.

No more backstreet art dealing for Mark Quint. For seven years, San Diego’s boldface gallerist and party thrower kept his HQ hidden in a La Jolla alley. This March, Quint Contemporary Art (quintgallery.com) debuts grand new digs a few blocks on busy Girard Avenue.

“We could not ask for better exposure,” says gallery director Ben Strauss-Malcolm. “Everyone has to drive down this road.”

A two-year search for a main-drag storefront led to the space next to iconic coffee shop Harry’s. Formerly Jane’s Fabrique, in business for 46 years until the owner passed away last April, the address is near La Jolla’s posh design district. It also nearly doubles Quint’s square footage, from 1,600 to just under 3,000, which will include an exhibition area, a private showroom and offices with 15-foot ceilings. Did we mention off-street parking?

Quint, who recently celebrate 30 years and was honored by California Center for the Arts’ 2009 exhibit QUINT, first set up shop in La Jolla in ’81. He relocated regularly, including stints Downtown and Miramar, where he hosted epic soirées for collectors and culturati.

Quint Contemporary Art has had several addresses in the past 30 years, but wherever it has been — downtown, Mission Hills, the Miramar area or La Jolla — the gallery has been a space you just had to visit. My history of seeing shows there spans 24 years; and from the first, I sensed that Mark Quint was the real thing, with his enormous passion for art and artists.

Happily, that intuition proved correct. But who knew that he was going to be able to sustain his space(s) for so long, in a town where collectors of serious contemporary art aren’t exactly plentiful?

It isn’t easy to pinpoint how he has accomplished this. But there are certain qualities that have worked in his favor: a keen eye for artists of vision and substance; the desire to stick with them; a curiosity about new artists; and a personality that appeals to museum professionals, collectors and, yes, critics, too. He was also willing to bring artists from afar for residencies (in partnership with Michael Krichman), which yielded a string of memorable shows.

Fifty seems like a reasonable number of artists for an exhibition meant to offer a mini-panorama of the San Diego art scene. It should be said that this show at Quint Contemporary Art is not a look at the wider regional scene that would encompass Tijuana; its title, “Homing In: An Exhibition of 50 San Diego Artists,” can be taken literally, for the most part.

One of the artists – and a very good one – does live in Tijuana: Iana Quesnell. But she emerged and went to grad school in San Diego, so the name of the exhibition doesn’t mislead much.

There’s a single work by each artist on view at Quint, and one might suspect that the show would be weighted toward the local ones that usually show there. You’d be correct in this line of thinking.

Nonetheless, Quint has long shown at least some of the best local artists, such as Jean Lowe, Kim MacConnel, Patricia Patterson and Jay Johnson. Happily, many of the picks from outside its stable in “Homing In” are also good ones.

The work of San Diego’s top tier contemporary artists hasn’t been seen in the same place at the same time since 1985, when the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art presented  “A San Diego Exhibition: Forty-Two Emerging Artists.”  

Quint Contemporary Art brings this long drought to an end with HOMING IN: An Exhibition of 50 San Diego Artists. The show presents paintings, photographs, video and sculpture; features abstraction and representation; and offers moods ranging from hot to cool – all in formats less than 24” wide due to the limited space available.  

Some of the exhibition’s artists are in their fifties, sixties and older; and were part of the La Jolla Museum’s survey nearly a quarter century ago.  The exhibition’s younger artists, those in their twenties, thirties, and forties may have no recollection whatsoever of that earlier survey.   

This exhibition is organized by gallery director Ben Strauss-Malcolm and in a move that’s unusual in the competitive world of contemporary art galleries he invited many artists affiliated with other local galleries to participate in order to make the exhibition more reflective of the full gamut of work coming out of studios in the San Diego region.