QuintGallery.com

The fiction of flatness is on full display in “Behind What It’s In Front Of,” the debut exhibition conceived by Seattle-based artist and designer Roy McMakin in Quint Contemporary’s crisp new downtown La Jolla gallery. The show pairs McMakin’s furniture-qua-sculpture with the minimalist canvases of the so-called “Hard-Edge” painter John McLaughlin (1898-1976), creating a visual relationship that works to dispel the popular myth that a surface can ever be flat.

McLaughlin’s paintings are high contrast formal reductions consisting exclusively of rectilinear forms rendered in a cool, muted palette. They are abstract configurations that suggest architectural elements like columns, doors, or windows. The contrast and position of these forms create weighted spatial fields, wherein shapes are ambiguously pulled forward or pushed back in illusionistic fashion. Juxtaposed to these are McMakin’s sculptures, blocky pieces of furniture that read like sculpted likeness of McLaughlin’s canvases, a sense heightened by their similarly painted schema. The McMakin objects are installed between the paintings on the walls or situated free-standing in the room, jutting out into space much the way McLaughlin purports to do illusionistically, establishing the primary visual rapport between the two artists.

Quint Contemporary Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by San Diego based artist ROBERT IRWIN. This will be Irwin’s first gallery exhibition on the West Coast since his “One Wall Removed” project at the Malinda Wyatt Gallery in Venice, CA (1980). The exhibition, Works in Progress, will change every two weeks during the run of the exhibit from March 19th through May 1st. A reception will be held on Friday, March 19th from 6 to 8 PM.

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.