Ged Quinn Ava Gardner Loves Our Country, 2014 Oil on linen 200 x 396 cm 78 3/4 x 160 inches ‘Ava Gardner Loves Our Country’ is a new work by Ged Quinn which integrates his more famililar landscape paintings with his new investigations into abstraction. Claude Lorrain’s ‘Erminia and the Shepherds’ of 1666 provides the framework for an Arcadian scene which is incised with filmic references. To the left of the painting, a box structure holds speculative scenes from the unmade film of St Paul by the radical filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini: a face rendered in blue buried alive; Snow White; a prison cell and a vision of Ostia, the location of Pasolini’s death. Overlaid onto the painting are two planar elements including an orange band of colour and purple block. Recalling American Colour Field painting, here Quinn is merging figuration and hard-edged abstraction. While previously in the artist’s paintings, contemporary elements were integrated into the landscape, here they take on full prominence in an exciting new development to his work.
