‘…why is there a shadow in a kitchen, there is a shadow in a kitchen because every little thing is bigger’ writes Gertrude Stein under the entry ‘Roastbeef’ in the section “Food” of her 1914 volume “Tender Buttons” in which she looks at everyday, familiar, unexceptional objects.

Unpacking the photographic images of German born Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze (1913-1951), known as Wols, and American artist Eileen Quinlan (*1972) a similar encounter with familiar objects, -cheese, beans, mud, flesh, liquids, cloths, a hand or a face- produces indelible imprints, representations of temporal operations and elemental materiality.

Quinlan and Wols are separated by time, historical circumstances and distinct photographic processes. And yet, their works embody the ambiguity of time, and yet both appear to delegate a part of their process to matter itself, as they travel across several genres: ‘portraits’, ‘abstractions’, ‘fashion photographs’ and ‘still lives’.

‘Always still to come, always in the past already, always present- …………

“Ah”, says Goethe, “in another age you were my sister or my wife”.