STARTUP 4 | Page 36

In a post-modern age where, in Quinn’s words, “truth” had been disenfranchised from the origins and subjugated by the corrupted "real”, the only way to provoke new meanings is to first corrupt the original meaning of the source itself. For things must fall apart before they can come together in new forms. Quinn uses painting to critique its own limitation, achieving what is still possible by questioning the process of image making and its legitimacy. Painting is not so much a didactic exercise for reproducing images, but in the first place it is a faithful experiment to reflect on the emotional andsymbolic power of images from a cross-cultural and historical perspective.

On view at the gallery is a series of new landscape, seascape, still life, and flower paintings presented together with a few portrait paintings from the past. A temporary dwelling with the structural outline of a small hut will take up a quarter of the entire gallery space. This architectural intervention is meant to break down the gallery space and to create different physical thresholds for looking at the paintings. The paintings with a horizon line will be installed at a uniform height to simulate how images from individual paintings will come together like disparate film stills and fall apart like a montage, with their meaning constantly evolving.

“I am excited to hold Ged Quinn’s first solo exhibition in Asia in the Pedder Building gallery. His work evolves from European tradition without being constrained by it, drawing from his own experience of an increasingly global yet contradictory world. There is a relationship between landscape, abstraction and image making in art history that has often been overlooked.“ — Pearl Lam, Founder of Pearl Lam Galleries

GED QUINN (b. 1963), Model for Contempt, 2017, Oil on linen, 45 x 68 cm (17 3/4 x 26 3/4 in.)

Courtesy of the artist, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore