Kate McQuillen

Lives and works in New York, NY

Artist statement

McQuillen’s recent works are inspired by contemporary translations of ancient Greek and Roman texts by Emily Wilson and Stephanie McCarter. The paintings draw on episodes from Ovid's Metamorphoses—including Echo and Narcissus, Daphne and Apollo, and Salmacis and Hermaphrodite—as well as Roberto Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. These myths feature female characters who prevail over their foes, assume half-male, half-female forms, and speak loudly. The figures and stories become points of departure for the paintings to consider women’s speech and transformation, particularly during episodes of escape and displays of power. Rather than treating myth as a fixed narrative, McQuillen is interested in its variations and in how speech is echoed, revised, and carried across time. McQuillen’s most recent exhibition, Echo Resounds, considers how the artist’s sources of inspiration, which also include Greek decorated pottery, Roman marble sculpture, and ancient texts, have been translated over the centuries—where stories, images, and voices reverberate through repetition, transformation, and time. Her new paintings illustrate these ideas into a visual language built through rhythm, movement, and accumulation by using repeated abstract strokes across super-flat surfaces. The exhibition marks a shift in McQuillen's practice towards more direct mark-making. She employs lifted and erased marks, and a structure which is always slightly broken, to create compositions filled...

Artwork