Echo Resounds

Massey Klein Gallery is pleased to present Echo Resounds, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Kate McQuillen. This is the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Echo Resounds presents new paintings by Kate McQuillen that are inspired by contemporary translations of ancient Greek and Roman texts by Emily Wilson and Stephanie McCarter. The paintings draw on episodes from Ovid's Metamorphoses—including Echo and Narcissus, Daphne and Apollo, and Salmacis and Hermaphrodite—as well as Roberto Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. These myths feature female characters who prevail over their foes, assume half-male, half-female forms, and speak loudly. The figures and stories become points of departure for the paintings to consider women’s speech and transformation, particularly during episodes of escape and displays of power. Rather than treating myth as a fixed narrative, McQuillen is interested in its variations and in how speech is echoed, revised, and carried across time. Rooted in abstraction and the history of female presence and its representation, Echo Resounds considers how the artist’s sources of inspiration, which also include Greek decorated pottery, Roman marble sculpture, and ancient texts, have been translated over the centuries—where stories, images, and voices reverberate through repetition, transformation, and time. McQuillen’s new paintings illustrate these ideas into a contemporary visual language built through rhythm, movement, and accumulation by using repeated abstract strokes across super-flat surfaces. The exhibition marks a shift in McQuillen's practice toward a more direct type of mark-making. She employs lifted and erased marks, and a structure which is always slightly broken, to create compositions filled with motion. The imagery in the works evoke sound waves, radio signals, and the transmission of speech; all modes of communication. At the core of McQuillen’s work, she is interested in how people communicate through stories, technology, and language. The show includes a community-based component, “Meet Me at the Met,” a series of informal small-group conversations in the Greek and Roman galleries at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In these meetups, the artist creates an opportunity for discussion while looking at a selection of Greek decorated pottery, bronzes, and Roman marble sculpture that have influenced the works in the show. She uses these objects as starting points for conversations about speech, fame, and women's voices in antiquity, and as a means to facilitate discussions about problems that existed in antiquity and which still affect us today. The project has deliberately been created without the use of social media, in the spirit of understanding the value of in-person conversation and the power of word of mouth. An accompanying limited-edition, hand-printed ‘zine, made in an edition of 80, is freely distributed to participants. Space is limited. 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 AGA Lab Amsterdam, 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 NADA New York 2026; The Armory Show, New York; 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 Artillery Magazine, Print Club Journal Women in Expanded Print, 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 Wells Fargo, Spear Street Capital, Temple University Libraries, Saks Fifth Avenue Corporate Collection, TD Bank Group, Morgan Stanley, Frans Masereel Center, Columbia College Center for Books & Paper Arts, and in 2022 the artist’s work was permanently installed in the lobby of the prestigious 225 W. Wacker Drive in Chicago, IL. The artist lives and works in New York, NY.

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