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Quint Contemporary Art (QCA) is very pleased to announce a solo exhibition of paintings and sculpture by Jean Lowe. This is the seventh solo exhibition for Lowe at QCA. The exhibition will open with a public reception on Saturday, April 21st from 6 to 8 PM.

Lowe’s exhibition is a mix of retail therapy and fairytale visions combined to create abrupt and fascinating interiors in her newest paintings and sculptures. Painted putti and gaudy Baroque interiors house a foreground of consumer products like those found at 99 cent stores, Walmart, Big Lots, thrift stores and flea markets. A trip Lowe took to Austria, Germany and Czechoslovakia informed the Baroque and Rococo interiors used in the paintings.

These whimsical interiors are painted with a loose brushstroke that is typical of Lowe’s painterly hand. The images are detailed but a close look reveal’s a blurred focus, their components melded seemingly together in a witty commentary on commercialism and extravagance. In a recent article for San Diego Home/Garden, Lowe said, “Being too obvious about my position can just be a turn-off, but humor and approaching things obliquely I think opens an avenue for conversation.”

Quint Contemporary Art is very pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Peter Alexander, Mary Corse, and Robert Irwin. These three artists are all associated with the Light and Space movement in Southern California during the 1960’s and 1970’s. This will be the first exhibition at Quint Contemporary Art for Los Angeles based artists Peter Alexander and Mary Corse and the second exhibition for San Diego-based artist Robert Irwin. There will be a public reception on Friday, September 23 from 6 – 8PM. The artists will be in attendance.

“During the 1960s and 1970s, light became a primary medium for a loosely affiliated group of artists working in Greater Los Angeles who were more intrigued by questions of perception than by the notion of crafting discrete objects. Whether by directing the flow of natural light, embedding artificial light within objects or architecture, or by playing with light through the use of reflective, translucent, or transparent materials, these artists each created situations capable of stimulating heightened sensory awareness in the receptive viewer.”
– Robin Clark PhD, Curator Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego

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.”

SAN DIEGO — Ever since Renaissance Venice, painters have traditionally worked by painting on cloth stretched taut over a rectangular frame made from strips of wood. But in the mid-1970s, when some artists and critics were claiming that painting was dead and ripe for burial, Kim MacConnel instead changed the rules of the painting game.

Two unexpected approaches emerged. Using bright acrylics, he painted on salvaged thrift-store furniture — sofas, tufted chairs and chaises. And, in lieu of off-white cotton canvas, he painted on strips of plain or commercially printed fabric, which he sewed together, did not stretch and simply push-pinned to the wall.

So what is the difference between a traditional canvas on rectangular stretchers and upholstery fabric stretched taut over a wooden frame assembled at a factory in the shape of a chair? Or commercial fabric hanging loose and free?

Quint Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the opening of Abracadabra: New Abstract Enamels, an exhibition to run in conjunction with MacConnel’s retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla. The retrospective, Collection Applied Design: A Kim MacConnel Retrospective, is the first for the artist in San Diego. This will be Kim’s eighth exhibition at Quint Contemporary Art. Please join us for an opening reception with the artist on Friday, November 5th from 6 to 8pm.

MacConnel has worked in San Diego for the past 30 years, and has recently retired as a professor of art from UCSD. MacConnel is a seminal figure in the Pattern and Decoration movement of the seventies, but overall MacConnel’s oeuvre has surpassed being categorized. His sensibility and talent has created a unique language using color and composition. He persuades the viewer to appreciate the appeal and conceptual property of patterns and draws inspiration from such wide-ranging and multicultural resources as the textile arts of numerous world regions, found graphic images, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso.

No one seems more tickled than Robert Irwin himself by where the artist, at 81, has landed. “It’s fairly humorous,” he says with a smile. Whatever the unsavory circumstances, “I come up smelling like a rose. I like what I’m doing.”

In his customary jeans and baseball cap, he sits among his newly installed work at Quint Contemporary Art in La Jolla, not exactly smug but clearly satisfied. This is his first commercial gallery show in California in 30 years, the result of several significant shifts in his working process. He resisted every one of them, but each ended up delivering unexpected opportunities. They’ve left him chuckling — surprised and grateful.

His new fluorescent tube sculptures relate to other work he’s made over the decades, but they sprang most directly out of an extensive exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego’s two newly built downtown locations in 2007-08. Director Hugh Davies organized the show, which traced Irwin’s evolution from Abstract Expressionist painter to creator of room-sized environments defined by light, space and color.

The exhibition turned out to be a catalyst for Irwin. “For a lot of artists, having a retrospective kind of freezes them,” Davies says. “With Bob it had the opposite effect. It really energized him.”