Marc Quinn
- You may also be looking for the America baseball player Mark Quinn
Marc Quinn (born 1964) is a British artist, best known for Alison Lapper Pregnant, a statue of Alison Lapper formally installed on the fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square, self, a sculpture of his head made with his own frozen blood, and Garden (2000). He is one of the Young British Artists (YBAs).
Life and work
He was not represented in the 1988 Damien Hirst-curated Freeze exhibition which brought the YBAs together for the first time (although he did at one time share a flat with Hirst). Quinn emerged in the early 1990s. He was the first artist represented by Jay Jopling, and was exhibited in Charles Saatchi's defining Sensation. Quinn's signature piece in the art world is self (1991, a frozen sculpture of the artist's head made from 4.5 litres (9.5 US pints) of the artist's own frozen blood taken from his body over a period of five months. Self, like many other pieces by the YBAs, was bought by Charles Saatchi (in 1991 for a reputed £13,000). The press reported in 2002 that the sculpture had been destroyed by builders employed to expand the kitchen for Saatchi's partner, the celebrity chef Nigella Lawson, when they unplugged the freezer in which it was being stored (it has to be kept at -12C/10F). This would seem to have been unfounded, however, as the piece was exhibited intact by Saatchi when he opened his new gallery in London in 2003. In April, 2005, self was sold to a US collector £1.5m. [1] His next important piece in terms of public profile was the frozen garden he made for Miuccia Prada in the year 2000. A whole garden full of plants which could never grow together kept in cryogenic suspension, "Garden" seems to anticipate many of the environmental themes which have become so important in the last few years. Quinn recently used this image in his limbo zygotic metamorphasis during his dream state. Quinn has also made a series of marble sculptures of people either born with limbs missing or who have had them amputated. This culminated in the 15 ton marble statue of Alison Lapper, a woman who was born with no arms and severely shortened legs, which sits on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in London. His portrait of John Sulston, who won the Nobel prize for sequencing the human genome on the Human Genome Project, is in the National Portrait Gallery. It consists of bacteria containing Sulston's DNA in agar jelly. Since 2005 Quinn has become known to the general public for his sculpture of Alison Lapper, which was on prominent display on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. In April 2006, Sphinx, a sculpture of Kate Moss by Quinn was revealed [2]. The sculpture shows Moss in a yoga position with her ankles and arms wrapped behind her ears. This body of work culminated in an exhibition at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York in may 2007.
He is recently separated from author Georgia Byng and has two children.