LA JOLLA, CA.- Quint Contemporary Art presents an exhibition of artwork from the estate of Manny Farber, opened July 23 and running through September 10, 2011. Manny Farber began showing at Quint Contemporary Art in 1985, and this is the seventeenth solo exhibition for the artist at the gallery.
The exhibition, comprised of approximately 20 selected drawings and paintings, features key works completed over the course of Farbers painting career. The works highlight Farbers passion for painting, film and the visual world in general. His cultivation of a tabletop working process can be traced from his earliest paintings of the everyday objects on his desk, like cigarettes and candy, to his later paintings with images including everything from art books, rebar and flowers from the garden of his wife, Patricia. He once described his art by saying:
what Im doing in paintings is pretty much creating movies. Im lining up objects and lining up paths through painting, pretty close to the way a movie director makes a movie. The direction of his painting career is charted from the mid-1970s to the early-2000s.
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 have included The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles; The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.