Kunstverein Düsseldorf

Eileen Quinlan

Wait For It

18 May - 11 Aug 2019

Eileen Quinlan, Christina (2012), installation view at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 2019, photo: Katja Illner
Eileen Quinlan – WAIT FOR IT, installation view at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 2019, photo: Katja Illner
Eileen Quinlan – WAIT FOR IT, installation view at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 2019, photo: Katja Illner
Eileen Quinlan, Twinned Mitsouko (2008 – 2015), installation view at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 2019, photo: Katja Illner
Eileen Quinlan, I Can See It, But I Can ́t Feel It (2018), installation view at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 2019, photo: Katja Illner
EILEEN QUINLAN
Wait For It
May 18 – August 11 2019

Curated by Eva Birkenstock
Curatorial assistant: Gesa Hüwe

“My work is about mortality, fecundity, sexuality, motherhood, domestic Sisyphean cycles, and battling entropy. It is about apertures, openings, holes, ruptures, cataclysms, storms, environmental collapse, mass shootings, and living with the specter of terrorism. (...) It’s full of existential questions about the nature of reality“, writes Eileen Quinlan in an interview on her work. For two decades the New York based artist has been exploring photography and image production in terms of both technique and content. She uses medium and large format cameras, digital flatbed scanners, and digitally resourced photography to produce nudes, self portraits, landscapes and still-lifes, though the actual exhibition prints usually derive from Polaroid Type 55 film. Instead of only scanning and enlarging the resulting negatives, she additionally attacks their surfaces to provoke accidental visual marks, traces of chemical friction, or the partial erasure of the image. To engage with the world around her, Quinlan undermines the indexicality as well as the materiality of the photographic – while at the same time incorporating her own conditions of production as a female artist.

WAIT FOR IT, her solo exhibition at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, presents a wide range of works from 2010 up until today. It follows the artist’s logic of continuoulsy reusing and re-editing images, of reaching back and forth across time, and resisting a linear articulation of ‘progress’. Thus, it aims at eliminating barriers by creating atemporal alliances and connections between the presented works, genres and procedures. Ten years after her first monographic exhibition at ICA Boston and countless international group shows, WAIT FOR IT is Eileen Quinlan’s first institutional solo show in Europe. It offers comprehensive forays into an extraordinary body of work while critically commenting on the lack of visibility of feminist art production. Which can wait no longer.
 

Tags: Eva Birkenstock, Eileen Quinlan