Eileen Quinlan

Eileen Quinlan (Boston, MA, 1972) lives and works in New York.
She explores the material boundaries of the photographic process by producing abstract images that are deeply grounded in feminist history, and the mechanics of presentation and consumption. Quinlan exposes the constructed nature of her medium by either mobilizing commercial photography techniques or manually altering the surface of the negative, making the hand of the artist appear and recede. The immaterial effects of our screenic devices, and their vertiginous flow of images, continuously frustrates our sense of touch, leaving us in a stupefied state where reality itself becomes fragmented.

She earned her MFA from Columbia University in 2005. Her work has recently been featured in group exhibitions such as New Directions: Recent Acquisitions at George Eastman Museum, Rochester (2024); Changes at MUMOK (2022) and in the Invitational Exhibition of Visual Art at The American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (2022).

Eileen Quinlan has had several solo exhibitions, such as Doll Parts at Emanuela Campoli in Paris (2023);The Waves at Miguel Abreu Gallery in New York (2023); Warhol, People and Things at Casa São Roque, Porto, Portugal (2022);Dawn Goes Down at Miguel Abreu Gallery in New York (2022); Acting Out, Eileen Quinlan in collaboration with Melissa Gordon at Manifold Books in Amsterdam(2022); Down Dog at Vistamarestudio in Milan (2022);WAIT FOR IT at Kunstverein Düsseldorf in Germany (2019) and at The Institute of Contemporary Art (2009). She has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions such as One Collection: Two Scenarios at FRAC Normandie-Rouen (2021); Artist’s Choice: Amy Sillman — The Shape of Shape at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2020); Objects Recognized in Flashes, a significant group exhibition curated by Matthias Michalka at MUMOK in Vienna (2019); Passante, at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris (2019) and in Tainted Love / Club Edit at Villa Arson in Nice (2019).

Her artwork was showcased in the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, as part of the exhibition Viva Arte Viva, curated by Christine Macel. Notable group exhibitions include New Directions: Recent Acquisitions at George Eastman Museum, Rochester (2024);Changes at MUMOK (2022); Invitational Exhibition of Visual Art at The American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (2022); Image Support at Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2016); Collected by Thea Westreich and Ethan Wagner at the Whitney Museum, New York (2015); and New Photography 2013, curated by Roxana Marcoci at MoMA, New York (2013). Quinlan also had two-person exhibitions at the Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens in 2016 and at The Kitchen, New York in 2012.

Her work is in the permanent collections of MoMA, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 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; CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson; FRAC, France (Fonds Regional d’Art Contemporain); The Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester; Auckland Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Brooklyn Museum, New York.