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.

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.