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Quint Contemporary Art is pleased to exhibit new work by Icelandic artist Thór Vigfússon. This will be the first solo exhibition of the artist’s work at Quint Contemporary Art and will include approximately 16 new glass paintings. Vigfússon was included in a 2008 group exhibition at QCA featuring prominent Icelandic artists. Thór Vigfússon: New Glass Paintings, will open with a reception on Saturday, November 19 from 6 to 8 PM. The reception is open to the public and the artist will be in attendance.

For many years, Thór Vigfússon (b. 1954) has been investigating the interaction between art and its surroundings through works made of glass, plexi, mirrors, and formica. He primarily works with colored glass and mirrors, which allow for engagement between the work and the viewer. The misleading simplicity of Vigfússon’s works are constantly mutating on an intimate plane with the viewer. The artwork creates a dialogue with architectural design through their simple geometric forms and pure colors.

Maximum minimalism: Icelandic artist Gudmundsson’s striking works at Quint, his first solo exhibition, are striking

By Robert L. Pincus, UNION-TRIBUNE ART CRITIC / BOOKS EDITOR

“I am trying to work within the field of tension that exists between nothing and something.”

— Kristjan Gudmundsson

Perhaps you have never asked yourself: Is there a sophisticated art scene in Iceland? And it would be understandable if you didn’t think there was, since its population is small and it’s remote from art centers like New York or Berlin.

The answer, though, is yes — and, in fact, Kristjan Gudmundsson, a leading Icelandic artist, has exhibited in Berlin, among other places. But it’s unlikely he would have exhibited in San Diego, if not for the interest that Mark Quint has taken in some of the work being made there.

Quint Contemporary Art is pleased to exhibit new works by Icelandic artist Kristján Gudmundsson. The exhibition, Paintings in Gray and White Frames, will be on view from February 5 through March 6, 2010. Kristján Gudmundsson’s work is defined by the essential, both in form and concept – working as he describes “within the tension that exists between nothing and something.”

Gudmundsson (born 1941) is an important and central figure of the first generation of Icelandic conceptual art – intelligent, severe, humoristic and poetic. Kristján began his career in the 1960s as a member of SÚM, a group of young artists, many of who were influenced by then-new currents in conceptual and installation art, mainly through the Fluxus movement. His seemingly meandering oeuvre consists of series of works that are surprising in their manifestations and, despite their different appearance, form an uncompromisingly consistent whole that respects the same values. He has masterfully joined Minimalism and Conceptualism.

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.