Roy McMakin and John Mclaughlin | Behind What It's In Front Of: Quint Contemporary Art: 7547 Girard Avenue

Quint Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the opening of our new exhibition space with Behind What It’s In Front Of, a show conceived by Roy McMakin to explore his many decade long fascination with the paintings of John McLaughlin. This will be McMakin’s sixth exhibition at Quint Contemporary Art. Please join us for an opening reception with the artist on Saturday, May 21st from 6 to 9pm.

From the recently released book Roy McMakin When is a chair not a chair published by Rizzoli, Michael Ned Holte offers this:

Undoubtedly, McMakin’s body of work can (and should) be placed in an artistic lineage that would include John McLauglin, Robert Irwin, and Charles Ray – a lineage of shared interest in formal issues of space and perception that seems to have developed on the West Coast, which McMakin has called home for three decades. McLaughlin’s spare, immaculate, geometric paintings precede and predict minimalism. Many of the paintings relay on a reduced palette of black, white, and (sometimes) gray, and a modicum of rectangular shapes to efficiently construct figure-ground conundrums that a viewer can never fully resolve. Many of McMakin’s furniture pieces, including a desk and a dresser follow closely from McLaughlin’s tactics; for example, they employ black lines that are nearly indistinguishable from the negative voids or gaps.

Roy McMakin received his B.A. and M.F.A. from the University of California, San Diego. His work is included in numerous public and private collections and he has been selected to do commissioned pieces for the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, The J. Paul Getty Museum, the Henry Art Gallery, The Seattle Art Museum, and the University of California San Francisco.

John McLaughlin was born in Sharbon, Massachusetts in 1898 and after having worked for the U.S Army Intelligence in Japan, Burma, and China he settled with his wife in 1946 in Dana Point, California. In 1946 McLaughlin was awarded the Visual Arts Award from the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities and in 1963 he received a Tamarind Fellowship. His works belong in many private collections as well as major museum collections such as The Albright-Knox Gallery, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary, Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.