Gagosian Now Represents Nathaniel Mary Quinn

Gagosian announced today its representation of artist Nathaniel Mary Quinn, whose intense, collage-like portraits manifest the psychological hardships of his youth on Chicago’s South Side. The Brooklyn-based artist’s first solo show with the gallery is slated for this fall in Beverly Hills.

Quinn’s penchant for art emerged in early childhood, when he would draw on the walls of his family’s apartment in the Robert Taylor Homes, a public housing project tied to poverty and gang culture. That environment would come to inform his art, as does the neighborhood where he now keeps his studio: the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

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“This body of work is a reflection of the community in which I currently live,” Quinn told Galerie in an interview last August. “I’m fascinated by this community. I’m trying to record the old-school community, the guys I talk to every day, the guys on the street. It’s my way of trying to record that history. The question is, why does one need to record this history? Because this history is going to disappear because of gentrification and change.”

Nathaniel Mary Quinn, The Disappointed Victim, 2019. Oil paint, paint stick, gouache, soft pastel oil pastel on linen canvas. Photo: Courtesy of Almine Rech, Brussels

NBA All-Star Carmelo Anthony, who collects his work, recalled his first visit to Quinn’s studio. “I could really relate to the storytelling that’s in his portraits,” Anthony told Galerie in a recent interview. “His art is based on how he grew up in Chicago, the people he was around,” said Anthony. “Growing up, I knew all these same characters—basketball players, people in the neighborhood, older ladies who took care of the kids, aunties and grandmas, prostitutes and drug dealers.”

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On April 12, Quinn will participate in a group show opening at Gagosian’s Grosvenor Hill, London, location. The exhibition, “Visions of the Self: Rembrandt and Now,” juxtaposes the Dutch Master’s Self Portrait with Two Circles (1665) with self-portraits by leading modern and contemporary artists, and on April 13, Quinn will wrap up a show at Almine Rech in Brussels.