Ged Quinn - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Tuesday, October 15, 2013 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Wilkinson Gallery, London

  • Exhibited

    London, Wilkinson Gallery, Ged Quinn, 19 October - 20 November 2005
    St Petersburg, The State Hermitage Museum, Newspeak: British Art Now, 25 October 2009 - 17 January 2010
    London, Saatchi Gallery, Newspeak: British Art Now, Part I, 30 May - 17 October 2010

  • Literature

    Newspeak: British Art Now, Part I, Exh. Cat., Saatchi Gallery, London, Booth-Clibborn Editions, 2010, p. 233, illustrated in colour
    Newspeak: British Art Now, Exh. Cat., The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Booth-Clibborn Editions, 2009, p. 28, illustrated in colour

  • Catalogue Essay


    At first glance, The Ghost of a Mountain appears to be nothing more than a placid forest scene punctuated by the solitary presence of a quaint cottage. Its subdued light and somber colour palette of green and brown hues contribute to the work’s tranquility and reveals British artist Ged Quinn’s mastery of the style and techniques typical of German romantic landscape painters, such as Caspar David Friederich. Yet the more one looks, the more the serenity of the scenery metamorphoses into a dystopian arcadia, an enigmatic, sinister place marked by violence. The vicious destruction of the forest becomes apparent in the stumps and debris of the foreground, while the trees in the background acquire a menacing, sentinel-like presence. Thesesubtlyhint at the horror symbolized by the uncanny Lilliputian house that is none other than the Berghorf, Adolf Hitler’s favorite mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps and the place where he spent most of his time during World War II. Sitting atop Dante’s Mount Purgatory, the dictator’s abode is defaced by brightly coloured graffiti tags, naming personages from William Blake’s unfinished poem, The Four Zoas.

    Quinn thus constructs a complex game of historical, theological, mythical and literary allusions that gives this seemingly traditional landscape a powerful criticality and undeniable relevance to contemporary culture. The painting speaks to themes—the limitless barbarity of human beings, the shouldering of loss and collective trauma, the power of repression, the desire for salvation—that are as timeless as they are poignantly pertinent to a post-9/11 Lebenswelt. In fact, the work of Ged Quinn is indubitably representative of what art historian Craig Owens has identified as the “allegorical impulse” of some of the most important postmodern contemporary art since the 1980s.

    Thoroughly educated at Ruskin in Oxford, the Slade School of Art in London, the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf, and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, Quinn has created throughout his three-decade-long career rich and often polemical allegorical paintings with as much intellectual weight as emotional depth. Currently painting out of Cornwall, England, Quinn has had numerous solo exhibitions and group shows at prestigious galleries all over Europe.

34

The Ghost of a Mountain

2005
oil on linen
267 x 183 cm. (105 1/8 x 72 in.)
Signed, titled and dated 'Ged Quinn 2005 The Ghost of a Mountain' on central stretcher bar.

Estimate
£60,000 - 80,000 ♠†

Contact Specialist
Peter Sumner
Head of Contemporary Art, London
psumner@phillips.com
+44 207 318 4063

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

London 16 October 2013