Campoli Presti is pleased to announce Eileen Quinlan's sixth solo exhibition with the gallery, which will run
concurrently in London and in Paris.
Quinlan takes the exhibition as a critical stance, in which different aspects of her work over the past ten
years are unfolded and re-read. The inventorying and editing of the images opens up a field of mediations
between the original prints and their final display, allowing Quinlan to address questions of seriality,
abstraction and indexicality. Repetition and size are at play in the form of single images, diptychs or full
editions, explicitly reiterating the artist’s own steps. Instead of proposing a linear reinterpretation of her
work, Quinlan posits a circular temporality; revisiting, reusing and putting images from different times in
contact, making them contemporaneous.
The exhibition introduces different photographic genres such as still-life, portrait, and landscape which
expand the implications of abstraction. Quinlan’s abstract compositions are based on multiple staging
strategies from commercial photography. Based entirely in the studio, Quinlan produces still-lifes using predigital
photography techniques used to create backdrops —such as strobes, smoke, mirrors and textiles—
generating abstract images of light, colour, and texture. Usually defined by its absence, in Quinlan’s Bormo
for Beca the product appears exceptionally as a part of a commission by Lucy McKenzie and
Beca Lipscombe for Atelier E.B.
In Quinlan's nudes, photography is used as a field for performance. The female body is first shot with a
digital camera and later re-photographed with a 4 x 5 large format camera. Its shape is distorted by the
effect of vapour, water, and glass, as well as by the multiple physical interventions that degrade the surface
of the negatives. The body is subject to a continuous process of abstraction that involves digital as well as
analogue procedures.
The gallery is activated as a quasi-theatre and charged with a presence that disrupts the exhibition space
and reflects on the viewer’s performance of interest while experiencing art. While observing herself, the
viewer is invited to share the subjecthood of the artworks.
Eileen Quinlan's work is included in public collections such as MoMA, New York; the Whitney Museum of
American Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los
Angeles; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and FRAC (Fonds Regional d’Art Contemporain),
France. Her work formed part of New Photography 2013, curated by Roxana Marcoci at MoMA, New York.
Quinlan had a two-person exhibition at The Kitchen, New York in 2012 and a solo exhibition at the ICA in
Boston in 2009. Past group exhibitions include Rites of Spring at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston,
Texas (2014), What is a photograph at the International Center of Photography, New York (2014) and All of
This and Nothing at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2011).