31st January – 4th February, open daily 11 – 6pm
5th February 12 – 4pm
Private view 31st January 6 – 8.30pm
Kittoe Contemporary is delighted to present Jess Quinn – A Gathering Of Ancestors.
Dive into Jess Quinn’s surreal, colourful world and join us to celebrate her first solo exhibition which includes her most ambitious and large-scale works to date. Jess’s unique vision is vivid and unsettling – through her work she explores female archetypes and the experience of the female artist whilst facing her own demons. Her paintings reflect her personal struggle to survive and create in a restrictive and oppressive domestic space – the struggle to find her voice and independence, the struggle to reconcile child rearing with making art.
She skilfully weaves together memories and real events with fictional characters and places borrowing from fairy tales, folklore and history of art. It is a thrilling and potent mix and we cannot wait to share her enigmatic, compelling paintings with you.
‘I am not afraid to use colour and pattern and often employ an abundance of both – I have no interest in a muted world.’ Jess Quinn
‘Jess is a figurative artist of both narrative and surrealist disposition. That narrative however is hardly explicit, often casual, almost throw-away in its sly references and darkly fanciful associations. It draws freely upon myth, legend and fairy tale, and upon art history too, or seems to do so, for the hint is there, but left to us to pick up: so too those odd, scarcely noticed particular details – of socks, shoes, hats, collars and cuffs, rings and ribbons, a crab, a cat.
There is to it all a quietly unsettling, febrile, almost angry intensity of mood and feeling quite its own.’
William Packer – Artist & Art Critic. Quote from catalogue introduction.