Marc Quinn
Marc Quinn | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Marc Quinn 8 January 1964 |
| Nationality | British |
| Known for | Contemporary Artist |
| Notable work | Alison Lapper, Siren |
| Movement | Young British Artists |
Marc Quinn (born 8 January 1964) is a British artist and part of the group known as Britartists or YBAs (Young British Artists). He is known for Alison Lapper Pregnant (a sculpture of Alison Lapper which has been 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) and is known for his innovative use of materials to make art, including blood, ice and faeces; his use of bringing scientific developments into art; and his designs for "discussion-generating" artworks.
Quinn’s oeuvre displays a preoccupation with the mutability of the body and the dualisms that define human life: spiritual and physical, surface and depth, cerebral and sexual. Using an uncompromising array of materials, from ice and blood to glass, marble or lead, Quinn develops these paradoxes into experimental, conceptual works that are mostly figurative in form.
Life and career
Quinn was born in London in 1964. He studied history and the history of art at Robinson College, Cambridge. He worked as an assistant to the sculptor Barry Flanagan.[citation needed] Quinn began to exhibit in the early 1990s. He was the first artist represented by Jay Jopling, and was exhibited in Charles Saatchi's Sensation.
Marc Quinn has exhibited exhibitions including Sonsbeek ’93, Arnhem (1993), Give and Take, Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2001), Statements 7, 50th Venice Biennale (2003) and Gwangju Biennale (2004). Solo exhibitions include Tate Gallery, London (1995), Kunstverein Hannover (1999), Fondazione Prada, Milan (2000), Tate Liverpool (2002), Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2004), Groninger Museum, Groningen (2006) and MACRO, Rome (2006), DHC/ART Fondation pour l’art contemporain, Montréal (2007) and Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2009).
~Art practice~ Marc Quinn’s sculpture, paintings and drawings often deal with the distanced relationship we have with our bodies, highlighting how the conflict between the ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ has a grip on the contemporary psyche. In 1999, Quinn began a series of marble sculptures of amputees as a way of re-reading the aspirations of Greek and Roman statuary and their depictions of an idealised whole.
One such work depicted Alison Lapper, a woman who was born without arms, when she was heavily pregnant. Quinn subsequently enlarged this work to make it a major piece of public art for the fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square. Other key themes in his work include genetic modification and hybridism. Garden (2000), for instance, is a walk-through installation of impossibly beautiful flowers that will never decay, or his ‘Eternal Spring’ sculptures, featuring flowers preserved in perfect bloom by being plunged into sub-zero silicone. Quinn has also explored the potential artistic uses of DNA, making a portrait of a sitter by extracting strands of DNA and placing it in a test-tube. DNA Garden (2001), contains the DNA of over 75 plant species as well as 2 humans: a re-enactment of the Garden of Eden on a cellular level. Quinn’s diverse and poetic work meditates on our attempts to understand or overcome the transience of human life through scientific knowledge and artistic expression.
Works
Bread Sculptures
Marc Quinn's earlier works made in the late 1980’s where made using bread. He made a series of busts out of bread dough which he baked, then cast in bronze. The unpredictability of the material created contorted portraits of historical figures such as Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. Also cast from bread dough where the sculptures ‘Faim Asis’ (1989) based on Giacometti’s bronze figures, and ‘Young Dancer Aged 14’ (1988) based on Degas’ ‘Little Dancer’, unlike Degas’ precise depiction of a ballet dancer Quinn’s version ouzes with energy as the bread rises and takes on it’s own form. The yellow smiley face on Quinn’s piece is linked to the Acid House dance scene which was at it’s height when the piece was made.
"Self" (ongoing project)
Quinn's self portrait "self" is his signature piece in the art world. A frozen sculpture of the artist's head made from 4.5 litres of his own blood, taken from his body over a period of 5 months.[1] This he first did in his late 20s in 1991 continues to do it every 5 years. In interview in 2000, reflecting on the iconic artwork, he remarked, "Well, I think it’s a great sculpture. I’m really happy with it. I think it is inevitable that you have one piece people focus in on. But that's really good because it gets people into the work."[1]
Described by Quinn as a ‘frozen moment on lifesupport’, the work is carefully maintained in a refrigeration unit, reminding the viewer of the fragility of existence. The artist makes a new version of Self every five years, each of which documents Quinn’s own physical transformation and deterioration. Self, like many other pieces by the YBAs, was bought by Charles Saatchi (in 1991 for a reputed £13,000). Despite reports that the piece had melted[2], it was exhibited by Saatchi when he opened his new gallery in London in 2003. In April, 2005, Self was sold to a US collector for £1.5m.[3] The National Portrait Gallery in London acquired Self 2006. (Purchased through The Art Fund, the Henry Moore Foundation, Terry and Jean de Gunzburg and Project B Contemporary Art, 2009)
Quinn has also cast his head in various other materials for example in 1993 he created ‘I need an Axe to Break the Ice’ a latex cast of the artists head inflated within a glass sphere mounted on a sputnik like stand. The head was infated by Quinn’s own breath in the sphere and the sphere then sealed. 1997 he created ‘Shit Head’ out of his own dried feaces, and in 2009 he re cast ‘Self’ (1991) in solid 18 carat gold to create the piece ‘Frozen Head’. Moving away from using his own head being the subject in 2001 he created the piece ‘Lucas’, his new born son’s head made from the placenta and umbilical cord that Quinn selvedged after the birth. This he did again with the birth of his second son Sky in 2006.
‘Emotional Detox: The Seven Deadly Sins’ (1995)
This series was shown at the Tate Gallery in 1995 and deals directly with the artists catharsis, ‘ridding himself’ of his alcohol addiction. Being cast in wax and lead gives a key aspect to these works in as much as the materials have a historical and symbolic role with alchemy. What was a chemical dependency on alcohol is purged by an alchemical and magical symbolisation, the base metal of addidction turned quite literally into a gold(en) freedom. These classical bust-type works form a family of serialised hand, body and face gestures, which comment on the material and the immaterial, the real and the imaginary and deal with ‘deadly’ consequences – the poisonous status of lead leaves this beyond doubt. (David Thorpe, Incarnate)
‘You Take My Breath Away’ (1993) and ‘No visable Means of Escape’ (1996)
In these works Marc Quinn uses Latex and Polyurethane to create disembodied figures that hang by rope from the ceiling. These works demonstrate a concern that resonates in Marc Quinns ouvre with human expenditure and material aftermath. On the series ‘No visable Means of Escape’ Quinn is quoted as saying “Its an extreme moment iof transformation, a violent shedding of the skin. I’m always conscious that everything exists in a dimension of time, so these works are about shedding your past in a sense, and how we are constantly transforming ourselves” “The polyurethane has the same texture and feeling of skin. It’s about being trapped in our bodies, but there is also a liberating side to it. It’s about escaping what you’ve become without realising it. And also escaping from the confines of your boundaries, or your dimensions. Escaping from becoming a sculpture. They are saying that the physical is not the real dimension of the person.”
Garden (2000)
His next important piece in terms of his public profile was the frozen garden he made for Miuccia Prada in 2000, installed at Fondazione Prada in Milan, Italy. A whole garden full of plants which could never grow together kept in cryogenic suspension. In interview, Quinn explained how this worked, "When working with the frozen material, it’s like doing an experiment—different things come out of it. When you freeze something, it normally dries up. To avoid that, you have to stop the air from getting to the object. You can do this by casing it in [silicone]."[1] Following on from Garden Quinn froze various individual flowers and plants in silicone such as in the work ‘Flask’ (2002). In this piece a Nepenthes Plant (a canivorous plant) is held in a laboratory flask that is cast from animal blood.
Portrait of John E. Sulston (2001)
His portrait of John E. Sulston, who won the Nobel prize in 2002 for sequencing the human genome on the Human Genome Project,[4] is in the National Portrait Gallery. It consists of bacteria containing Sulston's DNA in agar jelly. "The portrait was made by our standard methods for DNA cloning," writes Sulston. "My DNA was broken randomly into segments, and treated so that they could be replicated in bacteria. The bacteria containing the DNA segments were spread out on agar jelly in the plate you see in the portrait." [5]
Quinn experimented further in 2001 with artworks made from D.N.A creating ‘Cloned D.N.A Self Portrait 26.09.01’ and ‘D.N.A Garden’ where the D.N.A of two humans is shown togeather with the D.N.A of the seventy-five species of plants that where shown in ‘Garden’, described by Quinn as a “literalisation of the garden of Eden because if you follow back the DNA of all the plants and the two human beings there will be a point where they converge, and that will be some single cell amoeba which is The Garden of Eden.”
Alison Lapper, The Fourth Plinth (2005-2007)
Quinn has made a series of marble sculptures of people either born with limbs missing or who have had them amputated. This culminated in his 15 ton marble statue of Alison Lapper, a woman born with no arms and severely shortened legs, which was displayed on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, London from September 2005 until October 2007. (The Fourth Plinth is used for rotating displays of sculpture.) In Disability Studies Quarterly, Ann Millett writes in the abstract of her research article, "The work has been highly criticized for capitalizing on the shock value of disability, as well as lauded for its progressive social values. Alison Lapper Pregnant and the controversy surrounding it showcase disability issues at the forefront of current debates in contemporary art."[6]
Quinn is quoted as saying
At first glance it would seem that there are few if any public sculptures of people with disabilities. However, a closer look reveals that Trafalgar Square is one of the few public spaces where one exists: Nelson on top of his column has lost an arm. I think that Alison's portrait reactivates this dormant aspect of Trafalgar Square. Most public sculpture, especially in the Trafalgar Square and Whitehall areas, is triumphant male statuary. Nelson's Column is the epitome of a phallic male monument and I felt that the square needed some femininity, linking with Boudicca near the Houses of Parliament. Alison's statue could represent a new model of female heroism. (Marc Quinn 2005)
Siren (2008)
Since 2006, Marc Quinn has made numerous studies of the supermodel Kate Moss. In April 2006, Sphinx, a sculpture of Kate Moss by Quinn was revealed.[7] 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. The sculpture is on permanent display in Folketeateret in Oslo [citation needed].
In August 2008, Quinn unveiled another sculpture of Kate Moss, this time in solid 18 carat gold, called Siren, which was exhibited in the British Museum, London. The life size sculpture was promoted as "the largest gold statue since ancient Egypt"[8] Siren was identified as using a similar strategy as Damien Hirst's diamond skull with its expensive use of material which could be dismantled if necessary, or in this case melted down, with the artworks as material investment plus added-value artist branding. It was also identified as containing several elements, including the celebrity subject matter and sensation-inducing pose, which accelerate media coverage.[8]
Quinn presents Kate Moss as a modern-day Aphrodite reminding us that Moss's likeness has become as iconic as the goddesses of the ancient world.
Recent work
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Allanah, Buck, Catman, Chelsea, Michael, Pamela & Thomas
In May 2010, Quinn revealed a series of new sculptures at Londons White Cube gallery including The Ecstatic Autogenesis of Pamela based on film actress Pamela Anderson and Chelsea Charms based on pornography model Chelsea Charms.[9]
Quinn has always been interested in the public's obsession with the body, its perfections and flaws, and how this obsession has led some people to alter their bodies in increasingly extreme ways.[citation needed]
Quinn's new sculptures, as Joachim Pissarro has noted in his catalogue essay to accompany the exhibition, are portraits of people who 'exemplify a disconnect between body and soul' and who 'open up a provocative new chapter in [Quinn's] exploration of the relationship between corporeality and spirituality - fundamentally addressing the notion of identity by asking: is one more or less one's self after cosmetic surgery?'[citation needed]
Quinn's new models include 'Catman' (Dennis Avner (who has been tattooed to look like a cat) and transsexual people such as Thomas Beatie, Buck Angel, and Allanah Starr. Quinn's portrait sculpture 'Buck & Allanah' depicts the two nude, standing hand in hand, in a pose reminiscent of Adam and Eve. The sculpture of Thomas Beatie depicts him at full-term pregnancy, bowing his head and cradling his abdomen with two hands.
Quinn has also made sculptures of celebrities. Pamela Anderson is depicted in polished bronze, doubled at the shoulder with an identical alter ego, as if part of a conjoined twin, her face staring at the ceiling in a state of ecstasy. Two large heads of Michael Jackson are carved out of black, white and red marble. The two sculptures work in dialectical opposition - depicting Jackson as he is most well known after numerous surgical interventions, one with a black face, the other white.
The exhibition also included a new series of flower paintings executed in reversed colour and two large-scale orchid sculptures in white painted bronze, installed in Hoxton Square, opposite the gallery.
In The Night Garden
As series of flower paintings that hung on the wall of the 'Allanah, Buck, Catman, Chelsea, Michael, Pamela & Thomas' exhibition (2010). With these, Quinn creates a contemporary Eden that is appropriately reliant on modern technology-an artificial environment that gives new meaning to the notion of 'the garden of earthly delights'. The series of paintings are described as vibrant- almost hallucinogenic.
'In the night garden' depicts mixed arrangements of flowers that naturally would never be found in the same climate nor during the same season. By placing tropical flowers next to wild country flowers, for example, Quinn emphasizes how modern technology enables us to defy Mother Nature and create combinations according to our own aesthetic preferences.
Books
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Personal life
He is married to author Georgia Byng and has two children.[10]
References
- ^ a b (2000). Just a load of shock?: An interview with Marc Quinn, Sculpture magazine.
- ^ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2093053.stm
- ^ Higgins, Charlotte. (21 April 2005). 'Saatchi Sells Britart Classic for £1.5m'. The Guardian. Retrieved 12 June 2009.
- ^ Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute website (7 October 2002). Retrieved 2 January 2010.
- ^ Jones, Jonathan. (22 September 2001). John Sulston, Marc Quinn (2001), The Guardian. Retrieved 2 January 2010.
- ^ Millett, Ann. (2008)."Sculpting Body Ideals: Alison Lapper Pregnant and the Public Display of Disability", Disability Studies Quarterly, 28(3). Retrieved 2 January 2010.
- ^ BBC News. (13 April 2006). 'Model Moss cast in bronze statue'. Retrieved 16 January 2010.
- ^ a b Preece, R.J. (March 2009). Rock star on tour: Damien Hirst at the Rijksmuseum, Sculpture magazine.
- ^ "Marc Quinn: Just Don't Call It a Freak Show". The Guardian, May 10, 2010.
- ^ "The new Marc Quinn". Times Online, January 22, 2008. Retrieved on February 28, 2008.
External links
