Kim MacConnel | Woman With Mirror: Quint Contemporary Art: 7739 Fay Avenue

Quint Contemporary Art is pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings by Kim MacConnel. There will be a public reception on October 19th from 6 to 8 pm. The artist will be in attendance. 

A seminal figure in the Pattern and Decoration movement of the seventies and eighties, Kim 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.

In this exhibition Kim MacConnel draws upon Picasso's painting Girl Before a Mirror from 1932. MacConnel approaches his new body of work by "creating" subjects out of the abstract forms but simultaneously allowing them to read as flat backgrounds. While Picasso lifted the "subject," or mask, or abstraction, out of the "fabric" of African tribal society, MacConnel is using the idea of Picasso's work to drop away that subject and focus on his "background," or fabric, raising it to the level of subject. And so the "paintings are about being in love - in love with seeing, in love with art history and in love with art," David Pagel. 

Kim MacConnel received his BA from UCSD in 1969 and MFA in 1972. He has taught in the Visual Arts Department in various capacities between 1976 and 1980, and permanently since 1987. He has been represented by the Holly Solomon Gallery in New York since 1975, and is one of the founders of the so-called Pattern and Decoration movement. His work has been exhibited in the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial Exhibition's in 1975, 1977, 1979, 1981, and 1985; The Museum of Modern Art's An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture, 1984; The Venice Biennale, 1984; and is represented in the National Gallery of Art, in the Morton G. Neumann Family Collection as well as the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.