Liverpool-born artist Ged Quinn is known for his complex paintings that combine references from popular culture, poetry, philosophy, cinema, literature and art history.
Read MoreOriginally a rock musician, Quinn studied art at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford; the Slade School of Fine Art, London; Kunstakademie Düsseldorf; and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam before returning to London in the 1990s. However, turned off by the buzz surrounding the Young British Artists and desiring space to discover his own style, he moved to Cornwall to work in relative isolation.
Painting with oil on both canvas and linen, Quinn's skill for naturalistic rendering is evident in his frequent recreations of Baroque, Romantic and Renaissance landscape paintings. In What the Lark Said (Death and the Maiden) (2012), for example, the atmospheric sky, rocky landscape formations and smoky, muted tones—all reminiscent of Italian Renaissance paintings—make the work appear as though it belongs to another century. Similarly, in Bela Forgets the Scissors (2016) an angel can be seen in the foreground of the type of hazy, multi-layered landscape common to classical allegorical canvases. Atop these antique-looking backgrounds, however, Quinn overlays painted anachronistic imagery from more recent eras; in What the Lark Said, a modern structure made of what looks like rusted metal overgrown with trees is juxtaposed with two haunting and surreal figures sitting atop a rock pile—one with its back splayed open to reveal its innards and another entirely skeletal. In Bela Forgets the Scissors, images are painted to look as though they've been stuck on to the landscape with tape, a trompe l'œil technique common to the artist's oeuvre.
In addition to film and art history, Quinn's paintings belie his fascination with the complex orthodoxies of Western philosophy. In Hegel's Happy End (2012), a bust of the German philosopher's head is pierced by a geometric wooden sculpture replete with abstractions of an origami bird, orb and a ghost-like figure. Seemingly poking fun at the veneration of philosophers throughout history, the painting Falling and Being-thrown (2011) depicts an animal in a tattered jacket and pants sitting at an easel and putting the delicate finishing touches on a portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche. Similarly tongue-in-cheek, Quinn's series of paintings of cake, rendered in naturalistic tones, reference ominous histories with sly humour. Sliced and repositioned to resemble buildings such as bunkers (Bunker Archeology [2012]) or a Berlin prison where Nazis were held (Cake in the Wilderness [2005]), the cake's meaning is subverted from a sweet treat to a symbol of violence and brutality.
With decidedly Surrealist undertones, Quinn's dream-like paintings read as jumbled narratives that consistently resist interpretation. Difficult to decode even for those with an intimate knowledge of semiology, his paintings intentionally layer meaning—while connections may be drawn between certain elements, they are often disrupted by others. For Quinn, the classical landscape therefore acts as a stage where various narratives play out among symbols. Explaining his sublime combinations of references in a 2017 conversation with Ocula Magazine, Quinn called his methodology 'a sort of freedom, it's like an intellectual nomadism. You're just wandering and you relate to something or you don't. You stop to look. You collect. You build your own museum of images.'
Quinn lives and works in Cornwall.
Elliat Albrecht | Ocula | 2018
