"The Comedian" by Nathaniel Mary Quinn

18 x 24 inches giclee print on Hahnemuhle German Etching paper 310gsm, 13/75 limited edition, (2017) -- framed

Publisher: Brooklyn Museum

Drawing from a difficult upbringing spent in an impoverished public housing project in Chicago, with a broken family, Nathaniel Mary Quinn makes large-scale, mixed-media drawings and paintings of collaged and fragmented figures, through which he demonstrates that we are all the sum of our experiences. In his words, “I hope to convey a sense of how our experiences, both good and bad, operate to construct our identities. I also want to portray a mutual relationship between the acceptable and the unacceptable, the grotesque and what is aesthetically pleasing.” Formed from an amalgam of family photographs, images from articles and advertisements, and his own furious brushstrokes and charcoal marks, the men and women who populate his compositions appear as hybrids, at once monstrous and delicate. For Quinn, they are portraits of his fractured family, and images of our multi-faceted selves.