Kim Macconnel | Abracadabra: New Abstract Enamels: Quint Contemporary Art: 7739 Drury Lane

Quint Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the opening of Abracadabra: New Abstract Enamels, an exhibition to run in conjunction with MacConnel’s retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla. The retrospective, Collection Applied Design: A Kim MacConnel Retrospective, is the first for the artist in San Diego. This will be Kim’s eighth exhibition at Quint Contemporary Art. Please join us for an opening reception with the artist on Friday, October 1st from 6 to 8pm.

MacConnel has worked in San Diego for the past 30 years, and has recently retired as a professor of art from UCSD. MacConnel is a seminal figure in the Pattern and Decoration movement of the seventies, but overall MacConnel’s oeuvre has surpassed being categorized. His sensibility and talent has created a unique language using color and composition. He persuades the viewer to appreciate the appeal and conceptual property of patterns and draws inspiration from such wide-ranging and multicultural resources as the textile arts of numerous world regions, found graphic images, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso.

In this new body of work MacConnel explores a loose brush stroke while being mindful of a minimal approach to the composition of the work. Each form, whether existing in positive or negative space; interacts with a rhythmic flow of color that has the eyes dancing in the simplistically constructed yet complex beauty of each piece.

Kim MacConnel received his BA from UCSD in 1969 and MFA in 1972. He has taught in the Visual Arts Department in various capacities between 1976 and 1980, and permanently since 1987 until retirement in 2009. His work has been exhibited in the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial Exhibition's in 1975, 1977, 1979, 1981, and 1985; The Museum of Modern Art's An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture, 1984; The Venice Biennale, 1984; inSite 1992, 1994. MacConnels’ work belongs in such collections as the National Gallery of Art, the Morton G. Neumann Family Collection, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Albright-Knox Gallery, The Fabric Workshop and Museum, as well as the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.