QuintGallery.com

Quint Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the publication of Here and There, Back and Forth, the most complete survey yet of work by artist Patricia Patterson, documenting the artist’s career and recent retrospective at the California Center for the Arts in Escondido. The public is invited to a launch party for the catalogue on September 17th starting at 6pm at the gallery. The event will then proceed to D.G. Wills Books, a block from the gallery at 7461 Girard Avenue, for a discussion by writers: Sally Yard, Kent Jones, Robert Polito, Robert Walsh and Leah Ollman. Patterson will be in attendance to sign catalogues. The event will be held at Quint Contemporary Art, 7547 Girard Avenue, La Jolla, CA.
& D.G. Wills Books, 7461 Girard Avenue, La Jolla, CA

Sally Yard – Professor of art history at the University of San Diego, writer and curator.

Kent Jones – Film critic, filmmaker and programmer who lives in New York city.

Robert Polito – Director of the Graduate Writing Program at The New School in New York, writer and editor.

Robert Walsh – Writer and legal affairs editor for Vanity Fair.

Leah Ollman – Art critic for the Los Angeles Times and Art in America.

Patricia Patterson’s first retrospective, filling all 9,000 square feet of this museum, encapsulates a career nearly singular in its focus but expansive – exhilaratingly so – in its emotional range and sense of formal adventure. In 1960, as a young art student, Patterson traveled to Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland. The visceral shock of the place, rocky and treeless, without electricity or plumbing, registered deeply, as did the relationships she developed there during a dozen stays over the course of 30 years. The Aran of her memory, along with sketches and photographs, became an inexhaustible well that she has drawn from as a painter, first in New York and since 1970 in Southern California.

Her earliest works here, modest-size oils on paper from 1962, present a tenderly observed taxonomy of the island’s chief elements: piebald horse, whitewashed house, cart, haystack, man kneeling in prayer. In one of the most recent pieces, a broad landscape in casein and pastel on canvas (2011), Patterson marries poetry, the evocation of sea and sky as gray atmospheres varying in density and viscosity, and prose, the faithful description of a pair of cows, their noses to the stone-strewn ground. Because of the continuity of Patterson’s subject matter, it doesn’t matter that the 60-plus paintings are not hung chronologically (though several large installations from the ’80s are re-created more or less intact). The work forms a cohesive whole much like a photo-essay, examining multiple aspects of a theme across time through the accretion of specific stilled moments.