The inside story of the Rolling Stones’ Foreign Tongues artwork
Artist Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s singular vision became the centrepiece of one of the year’s biggest and most provocative album campaigns
“I don’t have much interest in painting the person’s face as it appears,” says Nathaniel Mary Quinn. “I’m more interested in trying to find ways to paint the different modes of expression of the person … the personality and the essence of their humanity.”
It’s an approach that has made the Chicago-born, New York-based artist one of contemporary art’s most distinctive figurative painters. His fractured, dreamlike portraits assemble identity from overlapping memories, emotions, and experiences rather than conventional likeness. Quinn calls the approach “figurative abstraction”, describing it simply as an attempt to visualise the complex essence of humanity.
His 2025 solo exhibition at Gagosian in Chelsea, New York, marked a shift towards a looser, more fluid visual language, one Quinn admits he was “scared” audiences might reject. He needn’t have worried. The exhibition sold out, attracted museum directors, collectors, fellow artists, and celebrities – among whom was Mick Jagger, who, Quinn later learned, returned twice.
Soon afterwards, Quinn received a text suggesting The Rolling Stones were interested in speaking with him. Their producer, Andrew Watt, arranged a conference call with Jagger, and by the end of that “surreal” conversation, Quinn was officially on board to create the artwork for the band’s new album, Foreign Tongues.
