Kim MacConnel: TILT-A-WHIRL
Upcoming exhibition
Overview
Reception and Artist Walkthrough: Saturday, October 18, 11am-1pm
Quint Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of Kim MacConnel's bedsheet paintings and works on paper produced in San Diego between 1983 and 1986.
As a painter in the late 1970s, MacConnel resisted the canvas and began working with an unconventional support: commercially-produced bedsheets. The first iterations of this series were cut into strips and sewn or glued together, referencing Eastern textile craft techniques that created interlocking columns of pattern and image that could be read in a number of different directions. The paintings in TILT-A-WHIRL, on the other hand, were made on unstretched California King bedsheets, representing a shift from a primarily pattern language to the pictorial, wherein singular images and color fields work in unison to define the composition. Several gouache studies, also on view, reveal how the artist tested these arrangements before scaling up their proportions.
MacConnel’s imagery was drawn from a self-assembled archive deriving primarily from Chinese "ad books." Discovered in stores in New York’s Chinatown, these books were filled with graphic illustrations of people, animals, food, architecture, and art objects that could be used in publications or advertisements to speak directly to consumers. By reproducing them with brush and ink in sketchbooks, then later acrylic on fabric, these images served as a democratic sourcebook of content between the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s.
Despite their playful surfaces, his paintings encourage a sustained inquiry into the porosity of cultural exchange and material value. Viewers encounter bucking broncos, squawking canaries, steaming plates of bean curd, Venetian gondolas—motifs that collide in fields of saturated color under a veneer of cheerfulness. Resisting hierarchy, their orchestrated chaos reflects a refusal of narrative order, as well as the overstimulated condition of today, where image and information merge in continuous flow and distinction between reality and fabrication grows increasingly thin.
Kim MacConnel (b. 1946, Oklahoma City, OK) is a pioneering figure in the Pattern & Decoration movement of the 1970s. MacConnel received both his BFA and MFA from the University of California San Diego, where he later taught painting until his retirement in 2009. His work has been included in such international exhibitions as the Whitney Biennials of 1975, 1977, 1979, 1981, and 1985; The Museum of Modern Art's An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture, 1984; the 1984 Venice Biennale; and inSite editions 1992 and 1994. In 2013, he was commissioned by the U.S. General Services Administration’s Art in Architecture Program to create two permanent works for the San Diego Federal Courthouse and has completed several public murals throughout Southern California. MacConnel’s work is held in major collections including the Brooklyn Museum, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, MOCA Los Angeles, SFMOMA, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He lives and works in Encinitas, California.
As a painter in the late 1970s, MacConnel resisted the canvas and began working with an unconventional support: commercially-produced bedsheets. The first iterations of this series were cut into strips and sewn or glued together, referencing Eastern textile craft techniques that created interlocking columns of pattern and image that could be read in a number of different directions. The paintings in TILT-A-WHIRL, on the other hand, were made on unstretched California King bedsheets, representing a shift from a primarily pattern language to the pictorial, wherein singular images and color fields work in unison to define the composition. Several gouache studies, also on view, reveal how the artist tested these arrangements before scaling up their proportions.
MacConnel’s imagery was drawn from a self-assembled archive deriving primarily from Chinese "ad books." Discovered in stores in New York’s Chinatown, these books were filled with graphic illustrations of people, animals, food, architecture, and art objects that could be used in publications or advertisements to speak directly to consumers. By reproducing them with brush and ink in sketchbooks, then later acrylic on fabric, these images served as a democratic sourcebook of content between the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s.
Despite their playful surfaces, his paintings encourage a sustained inquiry into the porosity of cultural exchange and material value. Viewers encounter bucking broncos, squawking canaries, steaming plates of bean curd, Venetian gondolas—motifs that collide in fields of saturated color under a veneer of cheerfulness. Resisting hierarchy, their orchestrated chaos reflects a refusal of narrative order, as well as the overstimulated condition of today, where image and information merge in continuous flow and distinction between reality and fabrication grows increasingly thin.
Kim MacConnel (b. 1946, Oklahoma City, OK) is a pioneering figure in the Pattern & Decoration movement of the 1970s. MacConnel received both his BFA and MFA from the University of California San Diego, where he later taught painting until his retirement in 2009. His work has been included in such international exhibitions as the Whitney Biennials of 1975, 1977, 1979, 1981, and 1985; The Museum of Modern Art's An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture, 1984; the 1984 Venice Biennale; and inSite editions 1992 and 1994. In 2013, he was commissioned by the U.S. General Services Administration’s Art in Architecture Program to create two permanent works for the San Diego Federal Courthouse and has completed several public murals throughout Southern California. MacConnel’s work is held in major collections including the Brooklyn Museum, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, MOCA Los Angeles, SFMOMA, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He lives and works in Encinitas, California.
Selected Works
