Manny Farber | New Small Paintings

Oct 19 - Nov 22, 2003 5171 Santa Fe
Installation Views
Overview

Quint Gallery is excited to announce the presence of world acclaimed artist Manny Farber on Sunday, October 19th from 4PM to 6PM for the vernissage of his solo exhibition: New Small Paintings.  The show will last through Saturday, November 22nd and is scheduled to travel to Austin and New York.

 

As a parallel endeavor to the Farber’s retrospective: About Face, curated by La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, New Small Paintings comes as a reassertion of Manny Farber’s relentlessly analytical quest. The new series focuses on the artist’s beloved bucolic still-lifes in a paradoxical controlled meditation, a quieter fixation whose resonance reaches the stratum of an AUM state of consciousness.  The number of emblematic, diaristic paraphernalia from the earlier works has decreased to yield a tamed symphony of more than ever vibrant hues of colour and channeled chaos.  Farber whose painting has materialized the abstract Id and Superego push and pull dialectics continues to imbibe us with the trenches of our own self-consciousness.  Everything in Farber’s art revolves around the tortuous journey of the incessant rhythmic dance of thought and process.  Indeed, the inner mental confrontation has figuratively deliquesced into an exploratory flow.  The colorful paintings lure through retinian enticement into a gargantuan philosophical spiral to spit one out enlivened and dizzy, muddy as if covered of amniotic fluid in a type of Being John Malkovitch protagonist experience.

 

Manny Farber’s pictorially bountiful, cerebral self-abuse echoes into the painted layers of his creations.  Waiting to be peeled like revelatory fruits, his work oozes with lucid confusion and art historical richness.  Ironically enough, the artist’s unthreatening still-lifes turn out to be swallowing organisms of existentialistic complexity, demonstrating ever so poignantly that all is one is all in this universally subjective logic.

 

Manny Farber is renowned for his contribution as an influential film and art critic.

A man of many denominations, he also taught at UCSD for 17 years and finally retired in Leucadia where he still lives with his wife, the painter Patricia Patterson.