Matt Offenbacher | New Paintings

Quint Contemporary Art is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new paintings by Matthew Offenbacher.

On the heels of Michael Duncan’s LA Post-Cool exhibition created for the San Jose Museum of Art and then presented at Otis College’s Ben Maltz Gallery in Los Angeles last summer, Offenbacher’s show offers a variety of unabashedly personal and quirky paintings. His works affirm a recent trend in art-making, which turns away from an emotionally detached “art about art” to embrace honesty, awkwardness and humor. The show features several shaped canvases of the cross sections of varying sizes of tree trunks. Instead of treating his subject in a straight-forward manner, Offenbacher enlivens these works by using many shifting colors to form the tree rings, producing a kind of psychedelic or magical take on nature. This playfulness extends to his painted plant portraits, done in a chunky, high relief fashion that recalls the work of Laura Owens. Also included in the show are a series of flattened animal pelts that simultaneously riff off of kitschy taxidermy and the experience of viewing seminal works of High Modernism. Offenbacher’s paintings combine an emotional punch with a meticulous eye to craft and detail, and the result is a group of works that are both whimsical and beguiling.

Matthew Offenbacher completed his BFA in 1995 at Tufts University, Medford, MA.  Offenbacher’s first exhibition was in the San Francisco bay area in 1998. Since arriving in San Diego in 2001 he has been included in numerous group-exhibitions.  On the heels of his solo exhibition at Quint, Offenbacher’s work will be included in a group exhibition in February 2004 at Acme Gallery in Los Angeles.