Ged Quinn, Untitled, 2010, Oil on canvas, 61 x 49.5 cm. Courtesy of Wilkinson Gallery, London. |
|
Ged Quinn's Internal Dialogues on Romanticism and Dystopia |
Ged Quinn, Untitled (Beria), 2010, Oil on canvas, 61 x 49.5 cm. Courtesy of Wilkinson Gallery, London.
Ged Quinn, On reaching the heart of the trackless forest, Lancelot lay down and soon fell in to a fathomless reverie on what may be found beyond the limits of realism and mythical thinking, 2009, Oil on canvas, 300 x 200 cm., Courtesy of Wilkinson Gallery, London. |
Wilkinson Ged Quinn presents a new body of work that not only ruminates on Romanticism and its historical forms and precedents, but also charts a narrative of its demise. Distinctly separated through the physical curation, the artist first details the envisaged end with a series of Romantic landscapes turned dystopian: Turner and Friedrich’s world on its knees polluted, its reputation besmirched. Within these, Quinn’s world, peered at through the canvas, we see the come down, after the sublime aesthetic high, laid bare. In the upper galleries the artist addresses the human cause of the downfall, placing them like rogues in stocks, mocked by their painted editions: Hitler with breasts or a bonnet; Beria, Stalin’s chief of police, with a black eye; before them Victoria and Albert and so on. The landscapes are not an attempt to envisage an alter-reality; instead they map the artist’s profusion of references and thoughts in any given period. They could even be seen as the churning of the mind after the emotional high, a dreamlike scenario reflecting on reality, but also apart from reality. There is an undoubted sense of allegorical statement to be found within the densely detailed surfaces, yet it is an allegory that the artist refuses to give an easy solution to, preferring a feeling of heightened ambiguity. Quinn commonly paints straight to canvas, initially with broad washes of paint and a loose handling, only to detail the surface as the work progresses; as such they are gestures of ongoing cognitive action, not tightly controlled, easily deciphered distillations of thought. The viewer is instead left to tread their own coded path into the image and worm out the abundance of nonhierarchical cultural references independently. The strands and allusions are plethoric, rubbing shoulders with the philosophy and art historical motifs of the nineteenth century for example, the seeking viewer can also discern a lyric by John Cale in the show’s title. The unlikelihood of this companionship is mirrored in the barmy and almost prehistoric world evidently juxtaposed against the prosaic symbols of its downfall, an old mattress, a dumped utilitarian chair. Quinn is undoubted master and author of his creations, this itself responds to Romanticism’s idea of the artist as peddler of transcendent revelations; yet his authority over the works – each symbolism only ever finding its full subtext within the artist’s own mind and the converse democracy of giving the works over to the viewer’s personal determination — gives rise to questions of authority. The works are Quinn’s, he has rightful name to them, but the figures depicted in the portraits sort an authorship of different means. The suggestion that Quinn leads us to is that the corruption of sublime glory is undoubtedly down to a divine authoritarian madness. The portraits portray those that took on differing personas in their leadership, but all claimed transcended sanction. Each used aesthetics — stretching into the art historical modes of portraiture as social emblem — to give credence to their divine right. In Quinn’s world they are brought down with everything but egg appended to their faces. Ged Quinn studied at both Kunstakademie Dusseldorf and Rijksakademie Amsterdam. Solo exhibitions include Spike Island Bristol and Tate St Ives Cornwall. Recent group exhibitions include Newspeak: British Art Now at the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg and the Liverpool Biennial, Tate Liverpool. Quinn lives and works in Cornwall, UK. |
Ged Quinn, (The exiled forever coming in to land), 2010, Oil on canvas, 200 x 320 cm Courtesy of Wilkinson Gallery, London. |
Ged Quinn, Hallelujah, 2007, Oil on canvas, 48 x 60 cm. |
Illuminations of the Duality in the Words of Marat's Murderer |
Ged Quinn, Dad with Tits, 2007, Oil on canvas, 60.5 x 48 cm.
Ged Quinn, The Height of the Vulgar Commonplace, 2007, Oil on canvas, 226 x 183 cm. |
Wilkinson In 1793 Charlotte Corday stabbed to death the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat in his bath. The image is famously depicted in Jacques-Louis David’s painting of the same year. The exhibition’s title is a translation of the script of the supposed note sent by Corday and held by the dead Marat as depicted by David. The duality of the message, at once supplicatory and demanding, requesting assistance and promising destruction is echoed in the works; a discourse of threat permeating the familiar and pleasing. Quinn’s new work shows irreverent use of diffuse and destabilising imagery and referentiality to both undercut and play with the discourse of threat. Rich landscapes into which Quinn takes signs of death, suffering, redemption and humour. An inimitable mix of revelation and obfuscation, of densely referential imagery. In Here is not the Place for Nostalgia the remains of a nondescript functional building sits abandoned and swamped in water — permeating decay into the vast landscape of Jasper Francis Cropsey (1823-1900 The American Sublime). Layers of drawings and markings on the walls and references to movements of the past, such as the first Dada exhibition (Pig in Army Uniform) or The Enlightenment where descriptions of The Grotesque were visualized (a two-headed figure drawn on wall) all suggest time passing. Glowing Orbs circle, hinting at the supernatural; a ghostly presence — while a wheelclamped Time Machine remains imprisoned in the present and prevented from moving back or forward in time. In No one here has heard of you, an imagined 17th Century Dutch flower painting, Quinn plays deliberately and ironically with the heavy symbolism of the genre. The vase is placed within a room — imagined scenes of the construction of the Tower of Babel can be seen through the window. The room is at the top of the tower that, the book of Genesis and apocrypha inform us, was built by a united humanity to reach the heavens. The vase has an image from The Exorcist (1973) where a struggle between good and evil is acted out while within the beautifully worked floral arrangement a skull is represented in Archimbaldesque style. In The Lone Ranger Quinn has taken Ruisdael intervened with Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed ironically floating with Angel wings above the bleak moonlit winter landscape as if resurrected. Large billowing clouds and black smoke hover menacingly over the dead tree and derelict buildings, where depictions of Earth, Fire, Air and Water are seen within the rooms. A lone figure in prison uniform (with dog) walks through landscape carrying a bird table. The Great Art of Light and Shadow takes as its backdrop Ruisdael's The Jewish Cemetery (ca.1679) [The Detroit version] albeit reversed, as though seen in a mirror. Like Ruisdael's work, highly charged with allegorical intent, Quinn works with a modern narrative overlaid and impregnated into the 17th century painting by using imagery of Andreas Baader's Stammheim cell of 1977 where the social activist turned terrorist was “found” dead. Quinn plays further by having the prison cell scene depicted through a Camera Obscura therefore suggesting something reflected from outside the picture plane. References to esoteric hierarchies of the angels, elemental powers, entropy, sex, American presidents and psychedelic album covers are all used to wider meaning in Quinn’s work creating a world where the esoteric and banal, archaic and modern symbols of Western culture and subculture coexist. |
Ged Quinn, Here is Not the Place for Nostalgia, 2007, Oil on canvas, 183 x 329 cm. |
