Eileen Quinlan: WAIT FOR IT

“My work is about mortality, fecundity, sexuality, motherhood, domestic Sisyphean cycles, and battling entropy. It is about apertures, openings, holes, ruptures, cataclysms, storms, environmental collapse, mass shootings, and living with the specter of terrorism. (…) It’s full of existential questions about the nature of reality,“ writes Eileen Quinlan in an interview on her work. For two decades the New York based artist has been exploring photography and image production in terms of both technique and content. She uses medium and large format cameras, digital flatbed scanners, and digitally resourced photography to produce nudes, self portraits, landscapes and still-lifes, though the actual exhibition prints usually derive from Polaroid Type 55 film. Instead of only scanning and enlarging the resulting negatives, she additionally attacks their surfaces to provoke accidental visual marks, traces of chemical friction, or the partial erasure of the image. To engage with the world around her, Quinlan undermines the indexicality as well as the materiality of the photographic—while at the same time incorporating her own conditions of production as a female artist.

WAIT FOR IT, her solo exhibition at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, presents a wide range of works from 2010 up until today. It follows the artist’s logic of continuously reusing and re-editing images, of reaching back and forth across time, and resisting a linear articulation of “progress.” Thus, it aims at eliminating barriers by creating atemporal alliances and connections between the presented works, genres and procedures. Ten years after her first monographic exhibition at ICA Boston and countless international group shows, WAIT FOR IT is Eileen Quinlan’s first institutional solo show in Europe. It offers comprehensive forays into an extraordinary body of work while critically commenting on the lack of visibility of feminist art production. Which can wait no longer.

Curated by Eva Birkenstock

Events
Wednesday, May 15, 2019, 7pm
Eileen Quinlan – WAIT FOR IT
Sparta & Kunstverein present an artist talk with Eileen Quinlan at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf

Saturday, May 18, 2019, 12pm
Eileen Quinlan – WAIT FOR IT
Guided tour with Eileen Quinlan and Eva Birkenstock

Saturday, May 18, 2019, 1pm
Liver, Kidney, Breath, Body: A Series of (Corporeal) Codas on Some Photographs by Wols and Eileen Quinlan
Lecture by Quinn Latimer (poet and critic based in Basel / Athens)

Thursday, June 6, 2019, 6pm
WAIT FOR IT – FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN
Guided tour through the exhibitions by Eileen Quinlan and Megan Rooney. Eva Birkenstock and Anna Lena Seiser talk about background and similarities of the current shows at Kunsthalle and Kunstverein

Every Thursday, 5pm
Guided tours with the team of the Kunstverein