Kate McQuillen

b. 1979; Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY

Kate McQuillen’s practice pushes the use of printmaking media outside of its traditional boundaries - the systematic application of paint, moiré patterns, squeegee ink deposits, and kiss marks where the silkscreen mesh has lifted from the panel. 

Through her hyper-flat and deeply matte surfaces, free of visual obstruction and rife with an emotive sense of imminent retrieval, the artist explores the transfer of ideas across time. Having been trained as a master printmaker, McQuillen now attempts to defy the rules. Her squeegee goes too close to the edge, she intentionally draws out moire patterns, she uses uneven surfaces to create “kiss marks,” and she floods the screen badly. Each of these approaches is a technical mistake in the printmaking canon, but in McQuillen’s process, they become the basis for her language as a painter.

The artist oscillates between the freedom of improvisation and the rules of reproducible media. Each surface can be changed on a large scale all at once, and with each “shot,” pieces can change fully, across the whole image, with one pass of the squeegee. A sense of erasure is revealed through each work - a lifting of layers of information - with an allover effect visually associated with mechanical processes. Her paintings walk the line between expression and mechanization, with a very slight separation of the artist’s hand from the surface.

Drawing from a wide range of influences, and coaxing images from specific source material, McQuillen’s paintings firmly establish their situational reality rather than acting as easily identifiable depictions of figures and scenes. Inspiration for her work includes gambling rituals, baby-monitoring devices, and patterns of Homeric verse. The artist is drawn to these subjects because of how they relate to ideas of “not-knowing": improvisation, interpretation, breaking rules, instinct, logic, and things that we understand without knowing why.

Kate McQuillen holds a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art, and an MFA in Visual Arts and Print Media from York University. McQuillen has completed artist residencies at Frans Masereel Center, MASS MoCA, Hyde Park Art Center, Ragdale, The Center for Book & Paper Arts at Columbia College, and Open Studio Fine Art and Printmaking Center. 

Massey Klein Gallery has presented two solo exhibitions featuring Kate McQuillen’s paintings: A Thief With No Loot (2023) and Wave Amnesia (2021). The Gallery has additionally featured works by the artist at Untitled Art, Miami Beach; NADA House on Governors Island; Dallas Art Fair; and Future Fair NYC. 

The artist has exhibited internationally including institutional exhibitions at IPCNY, Riverside Arts Center, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Columbia College Chicago, North Illinois University Art Museum, and the Hyde Park Art Center. She has been featured in The Brooklyn Rail, Art in Print, Hyperallergic, The Chicago Reader, Art Spiel, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Magazine, The Globe and Mail, Time Out Chicago, and Poetry Magazine. 

Her work is in the permanent collections of Temple University Libraries, Saks Fifth Avenue Corporate Collection, TD Bank Group, Morgan Stanley, and Columbia College Center for Books & Paper Arts. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.