Ged Quinn

Quinn is an English artist, he studied at the Ruskin School of Art and St Anne’s College in Oxford, the Slade School of Art in London, the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. He now lives and works in the UK.

 Quinn has exhibited internationally in many shows including ‘FOCUS: Ged Quinn’ at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, USA, ‘Endless Renaissance’ at Bass Museum, Miami Beach, USA, ‘Beyond Reality: British Painting Today’ at Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague, and ‘Newspeak: British Art Now’ at State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia.

He was represented by Wilkinson Gallery and is now represented by Stephen Friedman Gallery in London.

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.[2] 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.[according to whom?] 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.