QuintGallery.com

Quint Contemporary Art is pleased to be participating in ART PLATFORM – LOS ANGELES.

October 1 – 3, 2011
Opening Preview Friday, September 30
L.A. Mart®

Work will be on display by ADAM BELT | MEL BOCHNER | THOMAS GLASSFORD | RYAN MCGINNESS | ROY MCMAKIN | TAVARES STRACHAN | and more!

The Art Platform – Los Angeles art fair will demonstrate the rich and diverse cultural landscape of Southern California and underscore Los Angeles’ influential position within the contemporary art world.

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.

“I believe the search is more important than the Holy Grail,” says New York–based artist Ryan McGinness, whose vivid paintings and works on paper are collected by major institutions, like the Museum of Modern Art and the Cincinnati Art Museum. McGinness is best known for his hypercolor silkscreen canvases that break down symbols taken from urban signage and advertising into their most graphic forms. For his “Women” series, the 39-year-old has turned his focus to the most classic of painterly subjects: the female figure.

The series is a departure for McGinness, who started out in Virginia Beach, Virginia, drawing logos on T-shirts for his skateboarder friends. While his work is now collected by the industry’s boldface names, including Charles Saatchi and Jeffrey Deitch (his former dealer), he has never lost his renegade spirit. In 2003, he put on a show titled “Sponsorship” at his friend Shepard Fairey’s gallery, where he asked corporate sponsors to give money in exchange for seeing their logo hung on the wall.

As various species of artists go, Ryan McGinness seems happy playing the party animal.

In New York not so long ago he threw a party in his studio every Friday night for 50 weeks in a row. (“50 parties. 50 themes. 50 weeks” his tag line went, with themes ranging from “search party” to “prom.”) In Miami this last December he staged a show of glow-in-the-dark nude paintings at a strip club. So when it came time to think about exhibiting his work in L.A., the 39-year-old with the energy of a 19-year-old did not limit himself to galleries.

Along with planning four different gallery shows here from late May through June — featuring paintings, sculptures, works on paper and a high-concept project — he has planned “a barbecue lecture” for the Giant Robot store on Sawtelle Boulevard, art installations for both Standard hotels in L.A., and a three-night drawing performance at the hotel’s Sunset Strip location that begins June 1.

Mark Quint stands in Quint Contemporary Art, one of the few San Diego galleries that helped launch the city’s art scene. The painting behind him is a San Diego artist Kim MacConnel. Opposite: Frequent trips to the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego keep Quint abreast of new trends and talent, both locally and nationally. Shown is the museum’s La Jolla location, featuring Nancy Rubin’s Pleasure Point sculpture.

Mark Quint anticipated a short stay when he returned to his hometown of San Diego 30 years ago to try his hand at owning and operating a contemporary art space. “I figured I’d eventually move to New York or Los Angeles to be more immersed in the art world,” he says. “I knew there wasn’t a whole lot going on gallery-wise in San Diego.” So, at a time when merely a handful of exhibition spaces existed in the city, Quint founded his eponymous gallery, now located in La Jolla, showing the works of local artist friends he made during his schooling at the San Francisco Art Institute. Recognition quickly ensued for Quint’s fresh mix of emerging talent and, shortly after, for his efforts to make both national and international artists’ work more accessible to the city—a mission that prompted Quint to develop, along with local collector Michael Krichman, a program that invites artists from around the world to live, work and exhibit in San Diego. “I like to think I’m an artist’s dealer,” he says. “I really listen to the artists about what they want and who they recommend. I think that’s partly why I’ve been so fortunate in my work.”

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.