Saxon Quinn

Raised by his Australian artist mother, Dianne Coulter, in country Victoria, and later immersed in fashion, design and tech that took him to New York City in 2016, Saxon Quinn has honed a visual vocabulary that communicates in the subliminal signs and symbols of global culture and trade. This past decade his work has shifted seamlessly between Sydney, Melbourne, Los Angeles, Manhattan, Hong Kong, Seoul, Madrid and Copenhagen in a series of shows that have resisted the idea of an artist being fixed by a particular time and place.

In this way, Quinn is a kindred spirit of the CoBrA artists of the 1940s and 1950s who challenged the cool conceptualism of the art world by tapping into the primal energy and colour found in the drawings of children. Their refreshing freedom and wisdom can be found in the ghostly traces of paint and graphite of Quinn’s rough-hewn canvases, and inscribed on his ceramic figures that give a cheeky wink to the marble mythology of ancient empires – MAD magazine monuments that mark our movement through the artist’s painted world.

Accumulating on the patina of both these mediums is a palimpsest of intuitive scores and scrawls that we can read and riff with at random. And released in between these different records and notes is a voice that resonates clearly and without apology, speaking volumes.