Nathaniel Mary Quinn
Literacy Lab, 2019
Charcoal, gouache, soft pastel, and oil pastel on vellum
127 × 96.5 × 2.9 cm (framed)
Artist Talk: Nathaniel Mary Quinn
November 21, 2024 at 6:30 pm | Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, WA, US
Artist Nathaniel Mary Quinn joins Hirshhorn Head Curator Evelyn Hankins to explore the history and process behind his visually striking portraits.
Although his compositions resemble collage, Quinn draws and paints directly on paper using a variety of media, including paint, charcoal, and pastel, to render his subjects. His portraits often blend and blur fragments of the artist’s personal photographs and memories with imagery taken from print media and the Internet.
Quinn’s 2019 work Literacy Lab recently entered the Hirshhorn’s collection and is currently on view in Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960. Placed in conversation with Modernist compositions by Pablo Picasso and Fernand Léger, Quinn’s work highlights its roots in history even as it upends conventions. Quinn created Literacy Lab through a process that evokes the Surrealists’ “exquisite corpse” technique: he used paper to conceal much of his composition, letting himself see only the area he was working on. The result is a mesmerizing yet disarming juxtaposition of pictorial elements varying in scale, perspective, and color that, even as they point to Picasso’s and other Cubists’ fragmented forms, create a wholly unique space for empathy and a reconsideration of how we view others.
