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Quint Contemporary Art is pleased to showcase photographs and a new installation by artist Lee Materazzi during the Art Los Angeles Contemporary Art Fair being held from Thursday, January 27th through Sunday, January 30th at the Barker Hangar in Santa Monica. The installation, which includes a washing machine, laundry detergent and a line strung for drying asks the viewers to step outside the common gallery atmosphere and take part in a daily household chore. Photographs by the artist depicting routines of everyday domestic chores are shown alongside the installation. The subjects include the artist and her mother who amusingly take part in daily chores by heightening their physical involvement with the task at hand.

The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery has selected Lincoln Schatz’s 2008 commission for Esquire magazine, Portrait of the 21st Century for inclusion in their collection. The series of nineteen portraits, which includes George Clooney, Jeff Bezos and LeBron James, will be on view beginning Aug. 20 in the exhibition “Americans Now” through 2011.

Curators and historians at the National Portrait Gallery recommend to the museum’s commission (a board of 17 people who serve in an advisory role for the museum) a selection of objects portraying those who have made significant contributions to American life and culture. The works are chosen for their biographical and aesthetic impact and are created in a wide variety of mediums– paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, photographs and video art.

Quint Contemporary Art is pleased to exhibit new works by Icelandic artist Kristján Gudmundsson. The exhibition, Paintings in Gray and White Frames, will be on view from February 5 through March 6, 2010. Kristján Gudmundsson’s work is defined by the essential, both in form and concept – working as he describes “within the tension that exists between nothing and something.”

Gudmundsson (born 1941) is an important and central figure of the first generation of Icelandic conceptual art – intelligent, severe, humoristic and poetic. Kristján began his career in the 1960s as a member of SÚM, a group of young artists, many of who were influenced by then-new currents in conceptual and installation art, mainly through the Fluxus movement. His seemingly meandering oeuvre consists of series of works that are surprising in their manifestations and, despite their different appearance, form an uncompromisingly consistent whole that respects the same values. He has masterfully joined Minimalism and Conceptualism.