QuintGallery.com

QUINT: Three Decades of Contemporary Art

at the California Center for the Arts, Escondido Museum

August 15 – December 31, 2009

Special preview Saturday, August 15th from 6 – 9PM

340 N. Escondido Blvd.
Escondido, CA 92025
www.artcenter.org

Cocktails, hors d’ oeuvres, entertainment & live music.
$10 per person for non-members, free to Center Members.

RSVP to (760) 839-4120

The California Center for the Arts, Escondido Museum is pleased to present Quint: Three Decades of Contemporary Art. The exhibition, based on the program of one of San Diego County’s most influential galleries, will open on August 15th and continue through December 31st, 2009. Works in the exhibition, the majority of which have been borrowed from Southern California museums and private collections, present an extraordinary survey of the range of regional, national, and international artists supported and promoted by Quint Gallery over nearly thirty years.

Since opening his first gallery in La Jolla in 1981, Mark Quint adopted a unique, almost nomadic approach to the business of contemporary art. Rather than establishing itself in a permanent location and then expanding over time, Quint Gallery would more often adapt its spaces and program according to the needs of the artists it was interested in presenting. From formal gallery and raw open spaces in downtown San Diego, to large industrial workspaces for artists near Miramar Naval Air Base, to unexpected (and often elegant) spaces secluded in back alleys in Hillcrest or La Jolla, Quint Gallery has maintained the flexibility to represent artists employing a wide variety of practices, mediums, and formats.

Quint Contemporary Art is pleased to present work by Birgir Andresson, Allan McCollum, Jan van Munster and a group of Mug Shot photographs by Anonymous Photographers.

Birgir Andrésson (b. 1955 – d.2007) The exhibition will feature one of the artist’s wall installations from a series entitled Icelandic Colors. Born in the Westmann Islands in 1955, Andrésson went on to study visual arts at the Icelandic Academy of the Arts and then received a graduate degree from the Jan Van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht in Holland.

Andrésson was especially preoccupied in his work with spoken language, and the communication of visual perception, which he explored through text portraits, drawings, wall installations and three-dimensional constructions. The ‘Icelandic Colours’ are one of the strangest and most contradictory subjects in Andresson’s art and, like so many of his themes, they turn up again and again in different contexts. In his text-paintings the text appears on a solid field of color which is identified in a caption in the corner: “Colours: Icelandic Pantone 173, Icelandic Pantone 533.” To begin with this was perhaps just characteristic irony, making fun of pseudo-national trends in interior decoration. Later, however, these colors became a sort of signature that Andresson could use to put his mark on almost any subject he chose.

Quint Contemporary Art is pleased to present work by four artists from Iceland. The work brings together some of the finest aspects of Iceland’s cultural heritage, in particular it’s literary and linguistic trademark. The style used by these artists is concise, clear and direct. Only the essentials have been retained. The exhibition opens with a reception on March 21st and runs through April 26, 2008.

The mid-century preoccupation with poetry and storytelling forms an important background to the development of Icelandic conceptual art—characterized as “poetic-conceptualism” within Iceland’s arts community this provides an opportunity to consider the ways in which Icelandic artists make use of Icelandic literary traditions within the context of post-conceptual practices.

Birgir Andrésson (b. 1955) The exhibition will showcase “portrait” text works by the artist. Born in the Westmann Islands in 1955, Andrésson went on to study visual arts at the Icelandic Academy of the Arts and then received a graduate degree from the Jan Van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht in Holland.