QuintGallery.com

Quint Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the opening of our new exhibition space with Behind What It’s In Front Of, a show conceived by Roy McMakin to explore his many decade long fascination with the paintings of John McLaughlin. This will be McMakin’s sixth exhibition at Quint Contemporary Art. Please join us for an opening reception with the artist on Saturday, May 21st from 6 to 9pm.

No more backstreet art dealing for Mark Quint. For seven years, San Diego’s boldface gallerist and party thrower kept his HQ hidden in a La Jolla alley. This March, Quint Contemporary Art (quintgallery.com) debuts grand new digs a few blocks on busy Girard Avenue.

“We could not ask for better exposure,” says gallery director Ben Strauss-Malcolm. “Everyone has to drive down this road.”

A two-year search for a main-drag storefront led to the space next to iconic coffee shop Harry’s. Formerly Jane’s Fabrique, in business for 46 years until the owner passed away last April, the address is near La Jolla’s posh design district. It also nearly doubles Quint’s square footage, from 1,600 to just under 3,000, which will include an exhibition area, a private showroom and offices with 15-foot ceilings. Did we mention off-street parking?

Quint, who recently celebrate 30 years and was honored by California Center for the Arts’ 2009 exhibit QUINT, first set up shop in La Jolla in ’81. He relocated regularly, including stints Downtown and Miramar, where he hosted epic soirées for collectors and culturati.

Robert Irwin as an artist, theoretician, and teacher, has over the last 50 years, played a pivotal role in the development of the unique tenants of Modern Art. Through his own personal Husserlian reduction, his work became the precursor for art outside the frame and object. This includes installation art, light and space art, art in public spaces, site specific art, and what he now terms, conditional art which draws the focus to the relationship and role of the sentient being vis-à-vis the cognitive self.

Over the last 50 years Irwin has produced some extraordinary exhibitions and projects including: “Fractured Light – Partial Scrim – Eye Level” Museum of Modern Art, New York (1970-1971); “Black Line Room Division + Extended Forms” Whitney Museum, New York (1977); “48 Shadow Planes” Old Post Office, Washington DC (1983); “9 Spaces, 9 Trees” Seattle, Washington (1983); “Two Running Violet V Forms” Stuart Collection UCSD, California (1983); “Ascending” Musee d’ Art Moderne deVille Paris, France (1994); “Arts Enrichment Master Plan: Miami International Airport” Miami, Florida (1988); “Double Diamond” Musée d’Art Contemporain, Lyon, France (1997-1998); “1º 2º 3º 4º” Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (1997); “Exercises” Dia Center for the Arts, New York, “The Central Garden” J Paul Getty, Los Angeles (1998); “Architecture and Grounds” Dia Beacon, New York (2003); and “Primaries and Secondaries” Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2007-2008).

Irwin has received the Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1976), The MacArthur Fellowship (1984), and The Thomas Jefferson Medal for Architecture (2009). He also has been awarded a number of honorary professorships and doctorates. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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.

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.”