For Art Basel Hong Kong 2025, Arcadia Missa is excited to present a new body of work by gallery artists Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings. We will be exhibiting a series of 7 egg tempera paintings, a new medium the artists have been training in for two years. Art Basel Hong Kong will be the first time that the artists display their egg tempera paintings to the public.
Egg tempera is a method which uses egg yolk as a painting medium, with all the paints being hand mixed from pigment. The process involves building up tone in hundreds of nearly transparent glazes with a small brush, resulting in jewel-like colours and an incredible depth and subtlety that is difficult to achieve in oil painting. Egg tempera is a traditional painting technique that declined in popularity with the advent of oil painting but we believe the quality of egg tempera is impossible to recreate in other mediums.
Conceptually, the artists were inspired by Stuart Hall’s The Hard Road to Renewal and Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, a text in which Benjamin discusses a monoprint by artist Paul Klee. He outlines a metaphorical theory of history; “his face turned towards the past”, the angel witnesses not progress but a chaotic pile of debris, the accumulation of which we see as history.
Quinlan & Hastings’ paintings explore this post World War 2 reconstruction effort. From the wreckage of the war, in the UK, came a project of reconstruction and social consensus, in response to what economist William Beveridge described as “Want… Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness”. The artists were particularly interested on Walter Benjamin’s concept of the debris pile and what emerges from it, a period of rupture and renewal. By placing queer and androgynous figures into these landscapes, such images of the future are brought into question. In this context, the past, present and future sit in tension in Quinlan & Hastings’ work. Quinlan and Hastings’ practice enfolds processes drawing from antiquity – fresco, etching, egg tempera, the mosaics of their St James’s Park station commission – to interrogate histories of power, social injustice and the process of history itself.
Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings (b. 1991. Newcastle, London) are a London-based artist duo working in painting, drawing, video, performance, publishing and installation. Quinlan and Hastings’s collaborative practice is an exploration of the relationship between public space, architecture, state infrastructure, gender, and sexual identity. Their recent output has focused on fresco painting, a medium traditionally associated with historic and religious artworks. Quinlan and Hastings’ paintings depict various power dynamics; class, social relations, and positions of authority playing out in public space, raising the question: who does the street belong to?
Recent solo exhibitions include Arcadia, Arcadia Missa, London, UK (2024); Good Society, Eden Eden/Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin, DE (2024); Maison Populaire, Montreuil, FR (2023); Bleak House, Kunsthall Stavanger, Stavanger, NO (2023); Inside, Huset For Kunst & Design, Holstebro, DK (2023); Art Now, Tate Modern, London, UK (2022); Inside, Kunsthalle Osnabrück, DE (2022); In My Room, Mostyn, Wales, UK (2020); and Humber Street Gallery, Hull, UK (2020); We Lost Them At Midnight, Arcadia Missa, London, UK (2017); Gaby, Queer Thoughts, New York, US (2018).