Nathaniel Mary Quinn: ECHOES FROM COPELAND

Gagosian announces ECHOES FROM COPELAND, an exhibition of new paintings by Nathaniel Mary Quinn, opening at 541 West 24th Street, New York, on September 10, 2025. In these works, the artist explores themes of familial dysfunction, hope, aspiration, and redemption, inspired by Alice Walker’s debut novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970). As part of a continued meditation on his own creative influences, which include Francis Bacon and Romare Bearden, Quinn situates figures in different environments including interiors, a cityscape, and natural settings. These complex paintings combine intricate line work with detailed backgrounds, further contextualizing an increased narrative scope.

Captivated by the pursuit of self-realization and recovery from ancestral trauma that color Walker’s text, which tells the story of an African American family in rural Georgia over three generations, Quinn renders both real and imagined scenes and characters from the author’s somber narrative through a hopeful lens. In Study for Grange Copeland (2025), vibrant blue, orange, and yellow marks accent a portrait of the Georgia sharecropper against a shadowy background. In the novel, Grange is burdened by racial oppression and poverty. Becoming abusive toward his wife, Margaret, and son, Brownfield, he eventually abandons them to travel north, only to reexperience the very problems he sought to escape. In response, Quinn constructs an idealized reverie from Brownfield’s perspective, Paint-Drawing Study for Down The River (2025), a surreal episode in a father’s search for a better life.

In other works, Quinn builds on foundational aspects of his own practice by drawing on personal history. In Study for The Traveler (2024), the artist portrays himself dreaming of an escape from the impoverished conditions of austere public tenement housing on the South Side of Chicago. And in Study for Mary and Red Curtain—The Queen (2025), he considers the way in which his own mother may have seen the world during her midcentury Mississippi childhood.

The consistent presence of drawing techniques in Quinn’s new paintings, which retain their predecessors’ interweaving of naturalistic and fractured imagery, is signaled by the appearance of the term paint-drawing in their titles. I didn’t want to lose my attachment to drawing, the artist explains, so I found a way to bring it into painting. As long as it remains harmonious with the work as a whole, that’s the key.

gagosian.com