GED QUINN (B. 1963)

A bank of firs, beautiful and threatening, towers in the twilight of Ged Quinn’s The Ghost of a Mountain, calling to mind the sublime landscapes of the German Romantic painters. Yet all is not as it seems: a lilliputan cottage rests on a miniature mountain on the forest floor, nestled within brambles, moss and tree stumps. It is none other than the now-destroyed Berghof, Hitler’s chalet in the Bavarian Alps, rendered in delicate miniature by Quinn. Its tiny walls are no longer white-washed: graffiti daubs them, naming in neon colours the supernatural entities from William Blake’s 1797 epic poem Vala, or The Four Zoas. Perched over a yawning chasm, the chalet becomes the centre of its own universe, sun and moon spinning around, their feeble light failing to dispel the darkness. 
Quinn weaves art, literature, history and theology into a luxuriously dense web of horror and mystery. A constellation of references, drawn from across European history, real and imagined, is joined up into a work which addresses very much contemporary themes: the timeless nature of evil contrasted against the capacity of the human mind to neglect and forget.