Tara Donovan | Slinkys: Quint Contemporary Art: 7547 Girard Avenue

Quint Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new works by New-York based artist Tara Donovan, which will open with a reception on Saturday, February 6th from 6-8 pm. The opening reception is open to the public and the artist will be in attendance.

TARA DONOVAN is known for using accumulations of everyday objects in her sculptures and installations. In her newest series, Donovan uses Slinkys, the helical spring toy invented in the early 1940's. The familiar spring toy is disassembled, reassembled and manipulated into freestanding and wall-mounted sculptures.

Terrie Sultan, Director of the Parrish Art Museum, writes:

“Donovan has morphed the immediate tactility of these seemingly animate metal coils into massive, undulating shapes that rise up from the floor, projecting silver tentacles that reach into all directions, or meander up and across a wall and ceiling like ivy gone wild on a fence, in sinuous arrangements that claim and redefine the architectural spaces that host them.”

Donovan’s new series explore a world of intriguing familiarity manipulated by a hands-on repurposing of materials. In describing the reactions to Donovan’s work, Paul W. Brewer writes:

“They are often voiced in tandem with a disbelief in the actual material identity of commonplace items whipped into such fantastic concoctions, which represents a type of subversion of the mystique of the readymade as it has been promulgated in the context of contemporary art.”

Donovan’s work is grounded in a detail-oriented practice of true transformation through sculptural composition. The result will be a spectacular freestanding installation in the main gallery along with wall-mounted sculptures, prints and monoprints throughout the exhibition.

Donovan was the recipient of the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" award in 2008. She has had numerous important solo museum exhibitions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, UCLA’s Hammer Museum and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.  This will be her first exhibition at a private gallery in San Diego. Her work was last shown in San Diego at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego for a solo exhibition in 2009-10. Donovan’s work is part of numerous collections including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.