Mary Quinn Nathaniel
Got Myself a Gun presents a fragmented human face constructed through layered drawing and painting. The features appear distorted and partially erased, with marks resembling scars or seams running across the surface. One eye remains sharply articulated, standing in contrast to the surrounding disintegration. The dark background isolates the figure, emphasizing the face as a site of tension, vulnerability, and psychological intensity.
Nathaniel Mary Quinn is an American artist known for composite portrait paintings that explore visual memory, perception, and identity. Working primarily with oil paint, charcoal, gouache, pastel, and oil stick, Quinn constructs fragmented faces and figures from found and personal imagery, including family photographs, fashion magazines, and mass media sources.
Quinn was born in Chicago, Illinois. He received a BA in Art and Psychology from Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana, in 2000, and an MFA from New York University, New York, in 2002. Following his studies, he moved to Brooklyn, where he continues to live and work.
In 2013 Quinn developed a distinctive collage-based painterly approach that brought increased attention to his work. Since then, his practice has focused on translating the logic of collage into a cohesive painted surface, drawing on references to Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, and Francis Bacon, while centering Black subjects often absent from Western art historical narratives.
Quinn has exhibited widely in the United States and internationally, including exhibitions in New York, London, Los Angeles, Turin, and Chicago. His first solo museum exhibition, This Is Life, was presented at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin, from 2018 to 2019. Recent solo exhibitions include presentations at Gagosian and Almine Rech.
His work is included in major public collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museo Jumex, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Hammer Museum, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
Nathaniel Mary Quinn is represented by Almine Rech in Europe and the United Kingdom.
A fragmented portrait in which facial features are displaced and layered over one another. The work conveys a sense of inner tension and unstable identity, as if the subject is caught in a process of constant self-redefinition. The image feels both familiar and unsettling, emphasizing the fragility of wholeness and the complexity of self-perception.