Taking an active interest in French New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s use of montage and the Mnemosyne Atlas project by German art historian Aby Warburg, which investigates iconography and universalism in art, Quinn uses images without a linear progression or logic in mind. For the artist, making a painting is a visible thought process based on his own memory and improvisation to create a meta-narrative. The artist’s intention is to provoke an intertextual reading of painting; he takes it to a place where politics, literature, philosophy, and cultural memory create a vitality and tension that is both surreal and transcendental. Quinn states, “The reason that both Godard and Warburg interest me is that they function as composite works of images that are more about an iconology of interrelationships rather than the meaning of the images themselves. The spaces between the images are important because one’s perception is altered by the juxtaposition. I like to play with that dialectic of proximity and distance through montage images and intervention with the landscape.”
GED QUINN (b. 1963), I Hear an Axe Has Flowered, 2017, Oil on linen, 200 x 195 cm (78 3/4 x 76 3/4 in.)
Courtesy of the artist, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore