Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s Portraits Capture Multitude-Containing Selves

Nathaniel Mary Quinn b. 1977, United States Follow +

The figure in Nathaniel Mary Quinn‘s Frog (2021) is doubled in several ways. It’s a diptych that doesn’t quite line up, repeating parts of the nose and mouth but with differences in focus and the warmth of the light.

The materials are multitudinous too, a mix of oil paint, paint stick, oil pastel, soft pastel, black charcoal, and gouache. Suggestive of collage, Cubism, and the parlour game Exquisite Corpse, Quinn’s style makes an effort to get at the complexity that accumulates as we live.

‘I hope to convey a sense of how our experiences, both good and bad, operate to construct our identities,’ he said in press for the exhibition NOT FAR FROM HOME; STILL FAR AWAY at Gagosian New York (17 September–30 October 2021), where the work debuted. Gagosian shared a video of the exhibition from their Gagosian Premieres series with Ocula.

Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Gagosian Premieres

Quinn’s own history is more complicated than most. When his mother, Mary, passed away in his teens, he took her name as his middle name. Returning home from boarding school a month later, his father and brothers were gone without a trace.

The notion that we each contain multitudes, our personalities a tussle between our unique accumulations of joys and sorrows, is common to Quinn’s work. But the concept is taken even further in Frog.

Looking at the hoodie-wearing figure, it’s hard not to think of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old killed in Florida while wearing a hooded sweatshirt. Barack Obama said Trayvon Martin could have been him 35 years ago, a sentiment echoed by Frank Ocean when he sang that Trayvon looked just like him in the song ‘Nikes’ (2016).

The work suggests not only that Trayvon Martin had many different selves, but many different selves identify with Trayvon Martin.

Quinn’s works are in the collections of major institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Museo Jumex, Mexico City.

The highest recorded price for his work at auction is US $261,387 for the painting Over Yonder (2015), which was acquired at Phillips London in 2019. —[O]

Main image: Nathaniel Mary Quinn, The Lesson of Cut-Rate Liquor (2021). Oil paint, paint stick, oil pastel, soft pastel, gouache, black charcoal on linen canvas stretched over wood panel, in 2 parts. 91.4 x 182.9 cm. © Nathaniel Mary Quinn. Courtesy Gagosian. Photo: Rob McKeever.