John Millei at ONE and BEST PRACTICE: At Best Practice | One Night in San Diego: Paintings by John Millei
At ONE, The Reader will be on view from February 3-March 2, and at BEST PRACTICE, One Night in San Diego: Paintings by John Millei, will be up for one night only on February 10. There will be a reception on Saturday, February 10 from 6-8pm in the Bread & Salt arts complex where both spaces are located.
Quint Gallery is pleased to present a two-part exhibition of paintings by John Millei in collaboration with Best Practice.
This presentation highlights Millei’s suggestive approach to abstraction and portraiture, wherein he generates a sense of a perceivable image through collections of singular yet generous swaths of oil paint and flashe. Geometric sections of connected gestures offer evidence of a body, while cartoon-like eyes, hands and flowers complicate the works’ contextual reading as an expressionistic nod to its cubist forebears. Millei adopts an economical, reductive approach to image-making that provides just enough information for the observer to create their own meaning and interpretation.
Reader, displayed alone at ONE, is from a series of seated portraits inspired by friends, family members, and the self, working through a construction of his own contemporary archetypes, such as “The Gamer” and “The Painter.” At Best Practice, other examples of Millei’s hybrid method to abstraction will be on view, among them several “Heads,” which reduce the portrait further by removing any implication of facial features, and Napoleon, his attempt at capturing the oft-depicted exiled ruler as a young boy.
John Millei was born in Los Angeles and currently resides in Santa Barbara, California. His work is included in public and private collections including the Berkeley Museum, Berkeley CA; Dib Bangkok Museum, Bangkok, Thailand, Frederick R. Weisman Museum, Los Angeles, CA; LACMA, Los Angeles, CA; Colección Jumex, Ecatepec, Mexico; Legion of Honor Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco, CA; Nasher Collection, Dallas, TX.
ONE, founded by Quint Gallery in 2020, focuses on presenting a single and monumental work of art at a time. BEST PRACTICE is a not-for-profit art gallery founded by Joe Yorty and Allie Mundt in 2016, whose programming is rooted in the belief that compelling art poses more questions than answers, and that dignity, diversity, and equity are crucial to this commitment.
