The Armory Show: Kate McQuillen

Kate McQuillen’s paintings are rooted in action painting and abstraction. Her brushstrokes, however, are compressed through printmaking processes, creating a super flat surface into which marks, shapes, and colors seem to be embedded. Their unified surface quality and use of implied texture complicate notions of what gestural markmaking can be.

Throughout her process, McQuillen bends and breaks printmaking rules to build her images. For example, she intentionally draws out moiré patterns to create implied texture. Her squeegee goes too close to the edge of the screen, generating “kiss marks” that operate like shadows. She floods the screen incorrectly, and puts uneven pressure on the squeegee to create lines. Each of these approaches is a technical mistake, but in her process they create a language for painting. They allow screens to act like brushes, surface transfers to build shapes, and for improvisation and precision to exist together.

She is particularly interested in the squeegee as a tool, and the ability it gives her to make works beyond the scope of her body. With each pass of the squeegee, works can change fully, across the whole image. The speed and power that comes with these tools, and the very slight separation of the hand from the surface, allow the work to walk a line between expression and mechanization.

Drawing from a wide range of influences, and coaxing images from specific source material, McQuillen’s paintings firmly establish their situational reality rather than acting as easily identifiable depictions of figures and scenes.  Recent works have been inspired by the possibilities of storytelling, particularly in ancient Greek epics and tragedies. Many of them are influenced by Emily Wilson’s new translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the ability of those stories to blend abstract poetry and narrative drama, and to swing quickly between disparate concepts, such as beauty and destruction, within a single scene. She is committed to the possibilities of storytelling in abstraction, and how images can bring to mind a particular feeling, even when they are far removed from recognizable forms.

 
Kate McQuillen holds a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art, and an MFA in Visual Arts and Print Media from York University. McQuillen has completed artist residencies at Frans Masereel Center, MASS MoCA, Hyde Park Art Center, Ragdale, The Center for Book & Paper Arts at Columbia College, and Open Studio Fine Art and Printmaking Center.

Massey Klein Gallery has presented two solo exhibitions featuring Kate McQuillen’s paintings: A Thief With No Loot (2023) and Wave Amnesia (2021). The Gallery has additionally featured works by the artist at The Armory Show, New York; Untitled Art, Miami Beach; NADA House on Governors Island; Dallas Art Fair; and Future Fair NYC.

The artist has exhibited internationally including institutional exhibitions at IPCNY, Riverside Arts Center, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Columbia College Chicago, North Illinois University Art Museum, and the Hyde Park Art Center. She has been featured in The Brooklyn Rail, Art in Print, Hyperallergic, The Chicago Reader, Art Spiel, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Magazine, The Globe and Mail, Time Out Chicago, and Poetry Magazine.

Her work is in the permanent collections of Temple University Libraries, Saks Fifth Avenue Corporate Collection, TD Bank Group, Morgan Stanley, and Columbia College Center for Books & Paper Arts. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.