Vistamarestudio is pleased to present Down Dog, an exhibition by American artist Eileen Quinlan. The show features new works and marks the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery and in Italy.
Down Dog, deservedly one of yoga’s most recognized yoga poses, gathers together new works along with iconic ones from different series – from roughly a twelve-years period – that reveal Quinlan’s forays into abstract photography.
Central in Quinlan’s work are the exploration of the photographic boundaries and image production through experimental techniques – from digital to analogue, from downloaded to photographed – and the trial with materials.
The new works on show Wooly World, Bluestar, Silverstream and Venus Mount made in large scale with a flatbed scanner, are designed to offer the viewer an immersive encounter. Continuing to reckon with an abstracted space of desire, these are pictures to feel as well as see. These works are related to the series Smoke & Mirrors, Quinlan started in 2004, where she explores the arrangement in commercial photography, considering it not as a background staging but as a subject itself.
In the Yoga Mat series, the artist continues her research on abstraction by photographing folded and draped yoga mats, as an emblem of the contemporary lifestyle, health and spirituality. By picturing the body and its abstraction through photography, these works reflect Quinlan’s interest in feminist history and material culture.
The exhibition continues downstairs and is completed by the screening of the two-channel video There & Them, composed by Quinlan along with her long-time friend and artist Matt Keegan in 2012. This work was developed as an intersection of private and professional lives. A troupe followed the two artists for 24h from waking until sleeping, showing the everyday life of an artist in New York.
Eileen Quinlan was born in 1972 in Boston. Her work has been showed in solo and group exhibitions at numerous institutions worldwide, including Kunstverein Düsseldorf, Germany (2019); MUMOK Vienna (2019); the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017; Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2016); Whitney Museum, New York (2015); MoMA, New York (2013) and ICA, Boston in 2009. Her work is in the permanent collections of MoMA, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; FRAC, France (Fonds Regional d’Art Contemporain) and Brooklyn Museum, New York. She lives and works in New York.