Ged Quinn: Utopia Dystopia
Exhibition at Tate St Ives, 2004
Utopia Dystopia presents six major large-scale canvases produced during the six-month residency from August 2003 to January 2004, which ostensibly appropriate ‘master’ works from the European painting tradition. However, these invented worlds draw the viewer into a darker, more emotional and philosophical experience, as the artist disrupts the logical reading of these comfortably familiar works with his infusion of abstract references to Western cultural history. Drawn from his memories and experiences, realised through a variety of visual sources including television, books, newspapers and photographs, Quinn is constantly playing a subversive visual game which tricks the eye and the mind. From our embedded associations with particular images of landscape to the failure of art historical and political systems, his subtle interventions incite debate of contemporary and universal topics.
Cross in the Wilderness 2003-4 combines a model of Spandau Prison, the symbolic home to the Nazi war criminals, with Caspar David Friedrich’s Chasseur im Walde (Hunter in the Forest) 1813-14. In Quinn’s version the season has changed and the hunter is absent, opening up a dialogue between the significance of the forest in the Northern European psyche, its philosophical representation and political manifestation.
In Camp 2004 a vase, holding a profusion of invented flowers, is decorated with a sketch of the ground plan of Auschwitz. The painting, reminiscent of the still lives of the Dutch flower painters of the seventeenth century such as Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750), hijacks the encoded messaging systems of seventeenth century republican genre paintings to consider the relevance of scientific selection in the creation of hybrid flowers at that time to modern historical events and experimentation.
Quinn’s approach, combining multiple possibilities drawn from a four-hundred-year time span, gives great scope for inventiveness. Quinn also prompts the viewer to reassess their understanding of the historic notions of beauty, art and the role of the post-modern artist in the debatably dystopian era of the information superhighway.
