Almine Rech London features SCENES, a solo exhibition of recent works by Nathaniel Mary Quinn on view in London until 12th November 2022. This new body of work is inspired by personal memories, ideas of narratives on social media and in the words of the artist “visceral responses to visions that reflect memories and ideas as they unfold in the very making of each piece, allowing for further discovery.”

To realise his artistic visions, Quinn works with photographs as source material: ‘I use photographs as source material for making the work; the process of making the work reveals that I am re-creating a memory based on real life experience.’ In addition to Bergson’s concept of intuition as the epitome of creative consciousness, with his aspiration to come as close as possible to a vision from memory Quinn, who also studied psychology, evokes Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, in which memory is of central importance to the extent that it is made possible by a dynamic and manipulative censorship of the unconscious that has to be worked through in psychological examination. Freud thus understood psychological symptoms as symbols of memory that refer to past experiences, similar to ancient ruins and their relationship to historical buildings and ways of life, but with a decisive addition: ‘Unlike the archaeologist, who only has to remove the layers of time and decode the mutilations caused by decay, the psychoanalyst is confronted with another force, that of repression.