Ged Quinn

Work

He specialises in allegorical paintings that include contemporary images (generally on controversial topics in Western cultural history) in idyllic scenes based on classical paintings such as the pastoral works of Claude Lorrain and Caspar David Friedrich.

For example, his "Cross in the Wilderness" introduces a miniature Spandau Prison, the iconic jail for Nazi war criminals, into a forest scene based on "Der Chasseur im Walde" by Friedrich, a leading painter in German Romanticism. Another painting, "Darkening of the Green", places the controversial HM Prison Maze into a rural landscape.

Despite the familiar aspects in Ged Quinn’s use of painting techniques—ranging from the classical and Romantic traditions of European landscape, such as Caspar David Friedrich, to the American Sublime—his introduction of incongruent and often disturbing imagery, disruptions of scale, and an undercurrent of religious sensibility and political and cultural iconography creates a sense of haunting and dislocation.

In Quinn’s work, the landscapes themselves have a visionary character, providing an unfolding freedom that is a boundless showground for significance. There are circulations, juxtapositions, and layering that allow for a large amount of readings and narratives to develop and disappear. There is a constant sense of play both between and within the imagery, which gives space for meanings, yet ultimately denies the satisfaction of any final explanation.

There is an energy that moves throughout his works, which is in part driven by Quinn’s surreal and radical methods of composition and use of imagery. In conflicting and irregular landscapes, there are complex voids and structures.

Quinn is celebrated for his densely layered paintings that transform art historical techniques into contemporary experience. His paintings critique cultural icons through intervention, rather than through strict representation, with concepts of historicity and the collapse of boundaries between the internal and external, all working in definite ways to generate a stimulating political and cultural dialogue. He works in meticulous detail and executes with extraordinary technical skill. Multiple histories, narratives, and mythological emblems collide.

Solo

Group

Collections

British Museum, London, UK, FLAG Art Foundation, New York, USA, Honart Museum, Tehran, Iran, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, USA, Olbricht Collection, Essen, Germany, Saatchi Collection, London, UK, Tate Collection, London, UK, Tel Aviv Art Museum, Israel, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK, K11 Art Foundation (KAF), Hong Kong

Fellowships and Residencies

Selected publications