make me less evil, Angie Quick’s first solo exhibition at Museum London, brings together more than twenty paintings produced in 2022. Based in London, Quick is an artist who explores subjects of human emotion and embodiment through performance, poetry and painting. In this exhibition, her canvases explode in a riot of imagery: bodies merging and splitting, scenes of heaven and earth pouring into one another, and moments of tenderness alongside images of disorder.
What is it about vital overabundance that motivates Quick? What is the “evil” her exhibition title refers to? And what is she attempting to provoke in audiences? make me less evil aims to overturn the deep-seated but unspoken association of physical intimacy and embodied existence with shame, humiliation, vulnerability, and fear. The “evil” referred to in the exhibition’s title is perhaps tongue-in-cheek: a word that, for her, has often been misapplied to consensual pleasure, imaginative thinking, and norm-bending behaviour. Or maybe “evil” stands for anything that seeks to deny pleasure, imagination, and originality?
Through her paintings, Angie Quick represents life as fiery, beautiful, and ultimately a mystery. Challenging moral cliché and the narrow shopping list of “dos and don’ts” to which we sometimes tether our thoughts and actions, Quick celebrates the messiness of lived experience.
Image: Angie Quick, human history is four coordinates, 2022. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Michael Gibson Gallery
Press
Femme Art Review - April 10, 2023