NATHANIEL MARY QUINN. SPLIT FACE

Quinn explores the construction of memory and perception with references to his personal and familial history. In his practice, he blends people and events close to him with images from magazines, comics or found photographs.Split Face is his first monographic exhibition in Italy and presents a selection of paintings, many of them previously unpublished, alongside works of Renaissance portraiture and 20th-century masters displayed between the Museo Stefano Bardini and the Museo Novecento, from Donatello, Pollaiolo and the Della Robbia to Felice Casorati, Virgilio Guidi, Carlo Levi and many others.

His works, focused exclusively on painting and portraiture, have a close connection with his lived experience and mix the biographical universe, populated by events and people close to him, with the imaginative one, overlapping layers of memory and investigating the ability to process memories as well as to perceive the Other.

Challenging the canon of beauty that dominated portraiture until the nineteenth century, Quinn treads the path opened by the great masters of the twentieth century, including Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon, promoting a freedom of interpretation of the human figure, composition, balance, and psychological inquiry, and formulating an anti-academic language that is always original and unsettling.