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.

Addressing myths in American culture and alluding to art history, Matt Offenbacher’s work is thought-provoking as well as stunningly beautiful. The subject of history is often an overlaying tone of his work, whether he is working in hyperrealist painting, alluding to Dutch still lifes, or giving his painting of a bat the title of Looking at “One (Number 31, 1950)” by Jackson Pollock.

Matthew Offenbacher, statement for Beaver Paintings – May 21, 2005

This series could easily be mistaken for a kind of natural history, but really it is about people. I am interested in the way people construct and understand their aesthetic environment, especially when it comes to paintings. Beavers, like people, put incredible effort into making their surroundings safer, more comfortable, efficient and stimulating. Much of this effort is directed by one thing – the organizing motif of beaver society – control over the flow of water. An analogous control of flow is at the heart of painting: the flow of energy in and out of spaces, of capital in and out of marketplaces, of ideas in and out of forms, and, ultimately, of time inalterably running forward. The ability to slow, reverse, and transcend time is one of the most tenacious claims made by the culture of painting. This essential optimism, despite all evidence to the contrary, is what these paintings are about. This exhibition is dedicated to Anne Rapp Offenbacher (1912 – 2004)

“It would be hard to miss Matthew Offenbacher’s prominent “Plank” or upright “Column.” Both are done from canvas, paintings made to look like objects. “Plank” is a witty exercise in art references. In shape, it alludes to John McCracken’s sleek sculptures in the form of planks, which made their debut during the late 1960s. With their painted-on wood grain, Offenbacher’s objects use Pop stylistics from that same decade – in the Lichtenstein mode.”
— Robert L. Pincus, San Diego Union-Tribune, October 10, 2002, pg. 41