EILEEN QUINLAN

After Virginia

Chart, 74 Franklin Street, New York
November 8, 2019 to January 11, 2020

Links:
Chart

CHART is pleased to present After Virginia, an homage to the legendary gallerist Virginia Zabriskie by revisiting her 1989 show “Abstraction in Photography” presented at her eponymous 724 Fifth Avenue gallery. The exhibition surveyed various experimental techniques that developed throughout the 20th century, exploring images produced with both a camera and by other camera-less means.

After Virginia extends this conversation into the 21st century by revisiting work by 32 artists from the original exhibition and adding contemporary artists who have continued the dialogue with the medium in the 30 years since.

Encore
Wols, Eileen Quinlan, Josephine Pryde, Atelier E.B., Jazz Leeb
Organized by Helena Papadopoulos

Miguel Abreu Gallery, 36 Orchard Street, New York
October 30 - December 9, 2019

Opening reception and book launch: Wednesday, October 30, 6-8PM
Cello performance by Alex Waterman followed by a reading by Domenick Ammirati

Miguel Abreu Gallery is pleased to announce the opening, on Wednesday, October 30th, of Encore, a group exhibition featuring work by Wols, Eileen Quinlan, Josephine Pryde, Atelier E.B, and Jazz Leeb. The exhibition will be on view at the 36 Orchard Street location.

Encore is conceived as a set and a stage for the release of Always Starts with an Encounter: Wols—Eileen Quinlan (Radio Athènes and Sequence Press, 2019). The book—a companion to the eponymous exhibition, curated by Helena Papadopoulos and organized by Radio Athènes at the Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens in 2016—further explores the relationship between the work of two artists: Wols (1913–1951), whose opaque experience of the world translated in photographs, paintings, watercolors, poems and aphorisms, and Eileen Quinlan, who explores the material boundaries of the photographic. Spectral and suggestive, but also precise and factual the book owes its immersive design to David Reinfurt (Dexter Sinister). With contributions by Quinn Latimer, Laura Preston, Olivier Berggruen, Papadopoulos, and two conversations with Quinlan, it reflects on a circular idea of time as it wanders in the abstruse physicality of photography as a process.

Encore takes the idea of circular time and common crossings as its object and material and includes works by Josephine Pryde from her “Liver” series (2006), also reproduced in the book; new silver gelatin prints by Quinlan from her “An Image (Haunted by Wols)” series; newly published posters of the latest Atelier E.B (Beca Lipscombe and Lucy McKenzie) designs and details; photographs by Wols from a series commissioned for the Pavillion de l’Élégance at the World Fair in Paris (1937); and wax sculptures by Jazz Leeb, inspired by his trip to Paris with Quinlan, who was commissioned by Atelier E.B to photograph the backstage of their exhibition Passer-by at Lafayette Anticipations (2019), in the spirit of Wols.

This latest reprise opens with a special appearance by artist, musician and writer Alex Waterman who will perform Anna Magdalena’s copy of J.S. Bach’s Suite for Violoncello Solo No. 2 in D minor from Six Suites a Violoncello Solo senza Basso composeés par Sr. J.S. Bach Maitre de Chapelle, a salute to Quinlan and Wols, an accomplished violinist himself who was said to be often playing Bach on his banjo. Writer, Domenick Ammirati will read a text written especially for the evening, and select pieces from Atelier E.B’s Jasperwear collection will be circulating in the gallery.

Always Starts with an Encounter: Wols—Eileen Quinlan

Radio Athènes and Sequence Press, November 2019

Softcover w/ dustjacket, 227 x 182 mm; 220 pages, 20 color, 81 b/w illustrations; ISBN 978-1-7336281-3-6

The publication was made possible through the generous support of Goethe-Institut, Miguel Abreu Gallery, The Circle of Friends of Radio Athènes, and the sale of Eileen Quinlan polaroids. It is available in the Sequence bookshop located within Miguel Abreu Gallery and distributed worldwide by the MIT Press.

Artist’s Choice: Amy Sillman—The Shape of Shape
Museum of Modern Art, New York
October 21, 2019 – April 20, 2020

Links:
MoMA

The Museum of Modern Art announces Artist’s Choice: Amy Sillman—The Shape of Shape, an exhibition of nearly 75 works from MoMA’s collection selected by Sillman (b. 1955), an artist who has helped redefine contemporary painting, pushing the medium into installations, prints, zines, animation, and architecture. On view from October 21, 2019, through April 20, 2020, the exhibition includes a wide array of works, many rarely seen, installed in a unique shelving display on the fifth floor of The Jerry Speyer and Katherine Farley Building. The Shape of Shape is organized by Amy Sillman with Michelle Kuo, The Marlene Hess Curator, and Jenny Harris, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture.

Eileen Quinlan
Wait For It
Der Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany
May 18, 2019 – August 11, 2019

Links:
Kunstverein Düsseldorf

Artforum Critics Pick June 2019:

Eileen Quinlan’s photographic work, of which this exhibition selects from roughly a ten-year period, shows the artist’s consistent return to material experimentation and clear investment in lens-based processes of imagemaking. Contrary to its title, though, “Wait For It” is impatient to start. Already hung outside the gallery space are twenty unframed black-and-white photographs of yoga mats. With their soft folds paying reference to Judy Chicago’s vaginal abstractions in The Dinner Party, 1974–79, the series “Christina,” 2012, is also where the camera lens meets the texture of vinyl, emphasizing the haptic in Quinlan’s work and serving as a reminder of how photography, through pure light and shade, lends itself to this particular merger.

On a far wall, the twelve framed mirrors of Ghost Grid, 2016, reflect the surrounding space back into a familiar modernist structure. Here, the grid is less the domineering art-historical presence it secured in the last century than an apparition of sorts, as suggested by its title. While voiding the pictorial image, this work reaffirms a spectral quality rife in Quinlan’s practice—from the spiritual in daily exercise to the illusionism of staging—that can be traced back to early spirit photography and, more recently, to David Askevold and Mike Kelley’s “The Poltergeist,” 1974–79.

The mirror image appears elsewhere, too. Suggesting a move toward a biocentric consideration of the subject, portraits of the artist’s twin sister (Lady and Sister, both 2013) are shown together with low-res images of a fox’s head and a swimming otter (The Fox and The Otter, both 2016). If Quinlan’s photographic work is recurrent, it shows not just an ongoing dedication to the medium, but also a consistent return to personal reflection and subjective concerns. Whether this is implied by a yoga mat or her own body pressed up against a shower cubicle (Good Enough, 2015), Quinlan repeatedly pushes forth surface contact.

— Saim Demircan

Eileen Quinlan with Jazz Leeb
An Image (Haunted by Wols)
Risographed Postcards, 2019

Passer-by (Atelier E.B)
Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, France
February 21, 2019 - April 28, 2019

These postcards are made by Eileen Quinlan especially for Passer-by, shot over two nights as the exhibition was being installed. They are inspired by the fruitful collaboration between the German artist Wols and the Pavillon de l’Élégance of the 1937 International Exposition of Art and Technology in Modern Life in Paris. Wols was employed to make the official documentation of the Pavillon, which was under the direction of couturier Jeanne Lanvin. Taking their relationship as a template, Quinlan was employed by Atelier E.B to document the ‘backstage’ atmosphere of Passer-by, the gallery space in disarray while installing is in progress. Like Wols, she also turns this documentation into commercial postcards for sale to the visitor, using the on-site Risograph facilities of Lafayette Anticipations.

Links:
Atelier E.B
Lafayette Anticipations

Unexplained Parade
Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver
February 9 – May 11, 2019

Link: Catriona Jeffries

Tainted Love/Club Edit
Villa Arson, Nice, France
February 9 – May 11, 2019

Link: Villa Arson