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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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. In the fall of 2020, Quinlan’s sixth solo exhibition at Miguel Abreu Gallery, Dawn Goes Down, was presented concurrently with Displacements and Dead Trees, a two-person exhibition with Cheyney Thompson. Quinlan’s work was included in Changes, mumok, Vienna (2022–23); Warhol, People and Things, Casa São Roque, Porto, Portugal (2022–23); Invitational Exhibition of Visual Art, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (2022); Artist’s Choice: Amy Sillman—The Shape of Shape, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2020), Objects Recognized in Flashes, a major group exhibition curated by Matthias Michalka, mumok, Vienna, alongside Michele Abeles, Annette Kelm, and Josephine Pryde (2019); Passer-by, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2019); Picture Industry: A Provisional History of the Technical Image, 1844–2018, LUMA Foundation, Arles (2018); VIVA ARTE VIVA, the 57th International Art Exhibition, curated by Christine Macel, Venice Biennale (2017); and Always starts with an encounter: Wols/Eileen Quinlan, organized by Radio Athènes and curated by Helena Papadopoulos, Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens (2016). Previously, Quinlan participated in Image Support at the Bergen Kunsthall, What Is a Photograph? at the International Center for Photography, New York, and New Photography 2013 at the Museum of Modern Art, and in other group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, White Columns, the White Cube Bermondsey, the Langen Foundation, Mai 36, Marian Goodman Gallery, Andrea Rosen Gallery, and Paula Cooper Gallery, among others.
Quinlan’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 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, Mancheste;, 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, while Always Starts with an Encounter: Wols—Eileen Quinlan, was published by Radio Athènes and Sequence Press in 2019. Her seventh solo gallery exhibition,The Waves,was held at Miguel Abreu Gallery in March 2023.
