GED QUINN. Rose, Cherry, Iron Rust, Flamingo

GED QUINN. Rose, Cherry, Iron Rust, Flamingo / Pearl Lam Galleries 26.05.2017-08.07.2017

Venue: Pearl Lam Galleries, 6/F, Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central, Hong Kong

Pearl Lam Galleries is proud to present Rose, Cherry, Iron Rust, Flamingo , the first solo exhibition of Ged Quinn (b. 1963, UK), in Asia. Widely regarded as one of the leading painters in Bri tain, Quinn is renowned for his multi- layered landscape paintings that incorporate art historical subjects and the use of trompe l’oeil to challenge the idea of painting. Inspired by the poetry technique the “ideogrammic method” by the late American poet E zra Pound, the exhibition title, Rose, Cherry, Iron Rust, Flamingo , alludes to the use of concrete images to create an abstract concept and explores the different expository potentials of image making central to our reading of painting itself.

To create illusionary landscapes that oscillate in between the familiar and the surreal, Quinn carefully selects imageries from diverse historical and allegorical subjects and then renders them in front of idealised landscape backdrops by well- known masters of histo ry paintings, like Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, from the Baroque period. 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 intentio n 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 Wa rburg 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.”

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 and symbolic power of i mages 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 temporar y 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 g lobal 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