Eileen Quinlan: Line Call

Miguel Abreu Gallery is pleased to announce the opening, on Thursday, September 10th, of Line Call, the eighth one-person exhibition by Eileen Quinlan at the gallery.

Line Call is a show animated by the unruly drama of memory: the photographs included here span twenty years of Eileen Quinlan’s work. Old images are recalled to perform new tasks as they come into company with works being shown for the first time, including snapshot images of friends, family, and intimate spaces. The artist’s archive is open and displayed. A counterpoint to Quinlan’s heavily processed digital works, these ‘private’ images are shown, in a sense, untouched, printed and mounted without alteration. They speak to the burden placed on photography since its onset, its promise to capture and preserve, set within the context of an artist’s practice that has more often emphasized the photograph’s inherent instability and its penchant for change, decay, and evolution. The play of the matter, the show’s animacy or drama, is that one order of image supports the other, each performing subtle tenses of flux among the dual processes of how an image is conjured and what it conjures for perception.

The quality evoked by these works, structured both internally and in relation by the recurrence of lines, is mercurial: subject to sudden change, suggestive and sly rather than descriptive, eloquent without being overtly articulate. They are images that hold themselves open to interpretation; they sensitize us to the effects of how proximity, contact, and the impulse to association conditions every act of reception. The line in Line Call is a roving indicator—in one instance it maps a field or image contour and in another appears only incidentally. The line creates containers, or alerts us to absence, or is a pointer leading outside itself, attracting elements beyond the frame. (Mercury was a god of boundaries and bridges alike.) In Quinlan’s most recent works, printed on mirror grounds with images that overrun their frames, these competing valences of line are rendered most active by way of defiance. If the line can be said to arrive at these newest works, it moves like a signal throughout her archive that gathers toward proliferation, a raying out not unlike the light it works on, seeking a generous unpredictability against any sense of fixture.

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 other 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, 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, and Always Starts with an Encounter: Wols—Eileen Quinlan was released by Radio Athènes and Sequence Press in 2019.

Quinlan’s work will be featured in the forthcoming exhibition Remember Me: Masterpieces of Photography from the Pinault Collection, Bourse de Commerce, Paris.