Nathaniel Mary Quinn

Nathaniel Mary Quinn was born in 1977 in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in the Robert Taylor Homes, a Chicago public housing project. He attended Culver Academies in Indiana on scholarship from the ninth grade through the remainder of high school. He went on to Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, earning a bachelor's degree in art and psychology in 2000 (some gallery materials describe the degree as a BFA), followed by an MFA from New York University in 2002. Wabash College awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2023.

Quinn builds his paintings and works on paper from fragments, combining charcoal, pastel, gouache, and paint to construct composite, disjointed faces. Early solo exhibitions included Pace Gallery in London (2014) and shows with M+B in Los Angeles, Half Gallery in New York, and Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago through the mid-2010s. Gagosian announced its representation of Quinn in 2019, and he continues to also be represented by Almine Rech. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, in the Crown Heights neighborhood.

Critics and curators consistently place Quinn's fractured portraiture in dialogue with Cubism, Surrealism, and Francis Bacon, while treating the biographical material behind the work, his childhood in the Robert Taylor Homes and his path through Culver Academies, Wabash College, and New York University, as inseparable from its meaning. Artsy has profiled him as a market and critical "breakout," and his inclusion in group exhibitions such as The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure at the National Portrait Gallery in London (2024) situates him within a broader critical conversation about contemporary Black figuration. No verbatim critical quotation with a named author and outlet could be confirmed for this profile.

Quinn's documented auction record is Over Yonder (2015), which sold for GBP 212,500 (about USD 260,000, including fees, against a hammer of GBP 170,000) at a Phillips London evening sale in 2018; the exact calendar date of that sale has not been independently confirmed. A separate work, Hero, sold for USD 201,600 at Christie's New York in March 2023, again without a confirmed exact day. Public auction volume for Quinn remains modest relative to the scale of his primary market with Gagosian and Almine Rech, which is typical for a living artist whose gallery representation is still relatively recent. Whitewall reported in its coverage of his market that his prices rose sharply in the years leading up to his Gagosian representation, though that figure describes primary market movement rather than a verified auction series.

Quinn is represented by two major galleries, Gagosian and Almine Rech, and there is no published catalogue raisonne; verification generally runs through current gallery and exhibition records rather than a certificate program. His confirmed auction history is thin, anchored by a mid-six-figure result at Phillips in 2018 and a comparable result at Christie's in 2023, so collectors should treat any single public sale as a limited data point rather than a full market curve. Some biographical details commonly repeated in press, including his exact birth date and the precise dates of his highest auction sales, are not consistently confirmed across primary sources and should be treated with caution until corroborated directly with the artist's galleries or the relevant auction houses.