WLAC Exhibition
November 7, 2019 – January 23, 2020
Kim MacConnel attended the University of California, San Diego where he received a BFA degree in 1969 and an MFA degree in 1972. He lives in Encinitas, CA. He taught at the University from 1975-1980, and was named a professor in the Visual Arts Department in 1987 and remained teaching there until 2009. MacConnel is one of the founding artists of the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s, and began showing with the Holly Solomon Gallery, NY in 1976. The gallery became a stronghold of the movement. His work is in numerous public collections including the Albright Knox, Buffalo, NY; Brooklyn Museum; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Fowler Museum, UCLA; Frederick R. Weisman Collection, Los Angeles; McNay Museum, San Antonio; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Neue Galerie/Sammlung Ludwig, Aachen, Germany; Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University, Logan; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.
MacConnel's paintings, drawings and sculpture, including furniture, have been in exhibitions at museums and galleries around the world including the Whitney Biennials of 1975, 1977, 1979,1980, 1985; the Museum of Ghent, Belgium; PS 1, Long Island City; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, NY; and many others. He has been showing with the Rosamund Felsen Gallery since 2002.
Moto Okawa
Traveling east from Santa Monica to Downtown Los Angeles, Rosamund Felsen’s new space in the industrial and truck noise-filled Santa Fe neighborhood is beautifully airy. Its much anticipated debut is marked by the bright and bold, decorative abstracted patterns created by the West Coast veteran painter Kim MacConnel. The inaugural moment is an opportunity for the legendary gallerist to once again make her statement and stake her claim in the hip and hopping scene. And she delivers.
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Hunter Drohojowska-Philp
Rosamund Felsen, who first opened a gallery in 1978, has left her Bergamot Station outpost for the industrial arts zone downtown. It is next door to the new location of CB1, the collector-turned-dealer space of Clyde Beswick, and very near the new location of Cirrus, the gallery of print publisher Jean Milant, who first opened downtown in 1970. An enormous rent increase forced him to move from his 6th and Alameda location with just 30-days notice but he is now in a hub of activity with Night Gallery, Francois Ghebaly Gallery and The Mistake Room within walking distance. A new gallery for the artists collaborative Durden and Ray is across the street. So old-timers join newcomers to add depth and history to the neighborhood.
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Betty Ann Brown
To walk into an exhibition of Kim MacConnel's "Avenida Revolucion" paintings is to find yourself in the middle of a parade down the streets of a Mexican town. Flags flutter, costumes sparkle, music soars, and the world becomes a tsumani of color and motion. The riotous patterns of MacConnel's paintings swirl around in dizzying profusion, animating the walls with brilliant intensity. Orange circles bubble up through blue chevrons; red ribbons undulate through green fields; serpentine lines of white dance across yellow and turquoise. MacConnel uses all of our favorite choices from the crayon box with a playful exuberance that is at once childlike and entirely sophisticated. His deployment of geometry is also knowing: irregular triangles are sprinkled with dots, then scattered across a white field in a practiced dance of form that establishes a graceful equilibrium, rather than a mindless jumble.
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Carolina A. Miranda
There are a lot of reasons that longtime L.A. gallerist Rosamund Felsen is in love with her new exhibition space in downtown Los Angeles.
There is the light, a soft, filtered glow that pours down from the skylights onto a series of bright abstractions by Encinitas-based Kim MacConnel. There is the continuous rumble of the busy industrial street outside, with its mechanical parade of graffiti-bombed trucks and seafood delivery vans.
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Michael Shaw
Take one look at the announcement photo for Kim MacConnel's sixth solo show here and you'll know you're in for a riot of color. But not one without structure; MacConnel employs an approach that is equal parts systems and intuition. Each panel is divided into three or four columns, or vertical panes, within which slightly irregular triangles, parallelograms, half-ovals, and the like face off with their respective borders, whether negative and/or positive space. Given suggestive but ultimately minimalist titles such as "Bunny," "Rabbit," or "Dove," his latest bodies of work – including a mural-sized, multi-panel piece that was included in his retrospective "Collection Applied Design," at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (October, 2010 to January, 2011) – have ditched acrylic on canvas in favor of enamel on wood. Are they more finite? Probably. Sexier? Definitely (or maybe it's the other way around). MacConnel has never been shy about wielding palettes of unadulterated primary and secondary colors, though typically he balances in just enough sections of black and/or white to give one's eyes room to breathe; still, they're far from sedated.
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