Manny Farber | Paper Paintings 1967-1975: Quint Contemporary Art: 7547 Girard Avenue
Quint Contemporary Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of early works on paper by artist Manny Farber (1917-2008). This is Farber's eighteenth solo exhibition at QCA.
Manny Farber's monumental color field paintings created in New York and California during the years 1967 through 1975 were cut, stained, saturated, sliced, wet, glued, painted, folded, collaged, pleated, pasted, layered, dripped, brushed, glazed, bled, marked, colored, tinted, textured, smeared, pierced, trimmed, slit, creased, buffed, wiped, varnished, washed, graphed, drawn, scraped, burnished, rubbed, scoured, soaked, coated, veiled, and wrapped. They were "action" paintings, the geometric shapes intuitively constructed and then aggressively painted using the studio floor as an easel much the way Jackson Pollack made his drip paintings. They were created and initially seen from above, a birds-eye-view, mapped out, a form of topography. When finished they were roughly pinned to the wall, unmounted and unstretched. They have an immediacy and rawness that reminds one of Richard Tuttle's fabric works from the sixties but also reveal a cool elegance that belies Farber's energetic art making approach.
Born in Douglas, Arizona in 1917, Farber began painting in the 1930s. Before joining the faculty of the University of California, San Diego Visual Arts Department in 1969, he was a film critic in New York, writing for the New Republic, the Nation and ARTFORUM. Known in the 1950s and 1960s for his shaped canvas abstractions, Farber began painting still-lifes in 1974. He retired from teaching in 1987 and continued painting at his studio in Leucadia, California until his death in 2008. His solo exhibitions since 1982 included TheMuseum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles; The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg; PS1, New York and The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA.
