There is no doubt that my work is about my family. But it's also about the complexity of humanity and exploring that wide spectrum of colours.—Nathaniel Mary Quinn
Gagosian is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Nathaniel Mary Quinn, opening on June 8 at 4 rue de Ponthieu.
In this, his first solo exhibition in Paris, Quinn explores the construction of memory and perception with reference to his personal and familial history, as well as to art historical influences including Giovanni Battista Moroni, Rembrandt, and Francis Bacon. He also draws on psychotherapist Suzanne Imes's elaboration of Gestalt theory and philosopher Gaston Bachelard's unique approach to the psychic resonance of physical space. Working without preliminary sketches, Quinn produces composite portraits in oil paint, paint stick, oil pastel, charcoal, gouache, and soft pastel that simulate the appearance of torn-paper collage. These hybrid faces and figures are neo-Dadaist in their fractured appearance, yet realist in their carefully painted details and overall psychological effect. Focusing on the multifaceted nature of the subconscious mind, Quinn relates key episodes and individuals from his past to larger psychosocial concerns.
Making use of Imes's conception of Gestalt as a tool for understanding the self as inherently multipartite and mercurial, and for navigating the gap between internalised selfhood's contradictions and the imperative to present an outwardly coherent image, Quinn has assembled real memories and imagined episodes into new works including Study for Invader (2023). This portrait of the individual who broke into his mother's public-housing apartment in Chicago's South Side—reportedly to recover money after selling drugs on credit to his eldest brother—marks the beginning of a body of work dedicated to exploring long-accepted familial narratives absorbed by Quinn in the form of unreliable testimony ('If, for example, you've never met your dad and your mom tells you his story,' he explains, 'you construct an account based on what she says. The exhibition is based on that idea.'). Intruder (2023) also pictures the unidentified dealer, who was ultimately responsible for his mother's demise, when Quinn was still in high school.
Quinn felt empowered to respond further to memories and emotional responses centred on his mother's apartment by Bachelard's influential text _The Poetics of Space _(1958). Thinking about the features and contents of the property and the tenement complex to which it belonged—particularly a latticework metal grille that veils the building's façade—he explores some of the ways in which such sites are inevitably and indelibly suffused with personal association by incorporating visually distinctive elements of their structures into works such as _The Break-In/Apt. #604 _(2023). In another work, Super Jet (2023), which depicts the artist's four older brothers in a shopping cart, he draws on memories of the eponymous grocery store from which his mother sometimes bought food. An unusually playful image, it reflects an all-too-rare moment of fraternal lightheartedness in a childhood marked by hardship. In this exhibition, Quinn again confronts viewers with striking images that consider the often discordant constituents of individual identity through the conjoined lenses of subjective experience and shared cultural history.
Press release courtesy Gagosian.