Ged Quinn

Ged Quinn was born in 1963 in Liverpool, England. Before turning to painting, biographical sources describe him as having played in several English new wave bands in the early 1980s, including The Teardrop Explodes, The Wild Swans, and The Lotus Eaters; a songwriting credit on the 1983 single "The First Picture of You" is reported but has not been independently confirmed here.

He trained across several institutions: the Ruskin School of Art and St Anne's College, Oxford; the Slade School of Art, London; the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf; and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Public sources confirm these schools but do not document the specific degrees earned or the years attended.

Quinn's paintings place figures and objects, such as film stills, pop-cultural references, and historical documents, inside idyllic, classically composed landscapes, producing a visual friction between pastoral calm and contemporary or historical disturbance. He had early solo exhibitions at Tate St Ives (2004) and Spike Island, Bristol (2005), and was included in the 2008 Liverpool Biennial at Tate Liverpool. His work traveled internationally in the group exhibition Newspeak: British Art Now, shown at the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg in 2009 and 2010. In 2012 the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth gave him a dedicated solo presentation, FOCUS: Ged Quinn, and his work appeared in Endless Renaissance at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach. A further solo exhibition followed at the New Art Gallery Walsall in 2013 to 2014. He was formerly represented by Wilkinson Gallery and is now represented by Stephen Friedman Gallery in London, where he has held solo exhibitions including one in 2019 to 2020. He lives and works in Cornwall, England.

No verbatim, attributable critical quotation could be confirmed for this profile from the available sources. What can be said with confidence is that Quinn's exhibition history, spanning Tate St Ives, the State Hermitage Museum, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the Bass Museum of Art, situates him within a wave of British painters revisiting classical landscape composition to stage contemporary and historical subject matter. His pictures are consistently described in gallery and museum materials as combining meticulous, Old Master-influenced technique with deliberately anachronistic or unsettling content.

Quinn's highest documented auction price is The Fall, which sold for GBP 313,875 including premium at Christie's London on 14 February 2013 (Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction, Lot 36), about USD 490,000 at the time. Two earlier results remain his next-highest documented prices: Jonestown Radio sold for GBP 187,250 at Sotheby's London, and The Saints Go Marching to All the Popular Tunes sold for GBP 109,250 at Christie's London, both in October 2010. These results, drawn from a concentrated 2010 to 2013 window, form the bulk of his publicly documented auction history. The underlying auction databases are only partially accessible, so a complete ranking of every sale could not be verified, but no higher publicly documented sale has been identified as of mid-2026.

Quinn's auction history is short and concentrated, with his three highest known results all falling between October 2010 and February 2013 and comparatively little public sale activity since. There is no catalogue raisonne for the artist, so collectors should rely on gallery-based verification, currently through Stephen Friedman Gallery in London. Given the limited number of public sales, any single auction result should be read as an individual data point rather than as evidence of a broader pricing trend.