Quinn has exhibited internationally in many shows including 'FOCUS: Ged Quinn' at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, US, 'Endless Renaissance' at Bass Museum, Miami Beach, '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.
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.[3]
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[4] 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.[5]
Selected exhibitions
Solo
2017 Rose, Cherry, Iron Rust, Flamingo, Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong, China
2016 Ged Quinn, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, UK
2014 Ged Quinn, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, UK
2014 Cake and Lemon Eaters: Viktor Pivovarov and Ged Quinn, Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague, Czech Republic; The Gallery of Fine Arts in Ostrava, Czech Republic
2014 Landscape 2000, Osnabrück Cultural History Museum and Felix Nussbaum Haus, Osnabrück, Germany
2013 Looking at the View, Tate Britain, London, UK
2013 The Future's Not What It Used To Be, Newlyn Art Gallery, Penzance, UK
