Eileen Quinlan’s experimental process unfolds through a limited set of materials and brute repetition, probing and demystifying the circumstances of each image’s creation. It insists, by extension, on the constructed nature of all photographs. As such, the constructions themselves run the photographic gamut from the quasi-pictorial to the semi-abstract, from evidentiary document to expressive collage. The regime of the image materializes in its full heterogeneity, only to recede again under its own weight.
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Past
Eileen Quinlan (b. 1972, Boston) earned her MFA from Columbia University in 2005 and had her first solo museum exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in 2009. Her first survey show, Wait For It, at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, was held in 2019. Quinlan’s work was included in major international group exhibitions such as Changes, mumok, Vienna (2022–23); Artist’s Choice: Amy Sillman—The Shape of Shape, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2020); Passer-by, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2019); Objects Recognized in Flashes, mumok, Vienna (2019); Picture Industry: A Provisional History of the Technical Image, 1844–2018, LUMA Foundation, Arles (2018); VIVA ARTE VIVA, the 57th Venice Biennale (2017); and Always starts with an encounter: Wols/Eileen Quinlan, a two-person show, Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens (2016), among others. Previously, Quinlan participated in Image Support, Bergen Kunsthall, What Is a Photograph?, International Center for Photography, New York, and New Photography 2013, Museum of Modern Art, and in exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, White Columns, White Cube Bermondsey, the Langen Foundation, Mai 36, Marian Goodman Gallery, Andrea Rosen Gallery, and Paula Cooper Gallery.
Quinlan’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, all in New York; CCS Bard Hessel Museum, Annadale-on-Hudson; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Pinault Collection, Paris; Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Auckland Art Museum; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; V–A–C Foundation, Moscow; mumok, Vienna; Kunstpalast Düsseldorf; FRAC Normandie Rouen; Brooklyn Museum; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; FRAC Poitou-Charentes, Angoulême; The Kunstpalast Abteilung Fotografie, Düsseldorf; Kadist, San Francisco; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; George Eastman Museum, Rochester; and The Art Institute of Chicago.
The artist’s first monograph, Good Enough, was published by Osmos Books in 2018, and Always Starts with an Encounter: Wols—Eileen Quinlan was released by Radio Athènes and Sequence Press in 2019.
Quinlan’s work is featured in Remember Me: Masterpieces of Photography from the Pinault Collection, on view at the Bourse de Commerce, Paris, through January 18, 2027.
