TRACES:Marc Quinn

Today is the occasion to bear in mind the artist that since he sculpted a self-portrait out of his own frozen blood, Marc Quinn (8/1/64- ) has enthralled the public, annoyed many critics, and been embraced by collectors. The member of the Young British Artist is now middle-aged, but still notorious. This column is a tribute to artists, living or dead, who have left their mark in Contemporary Art. Through documents or interviews, starting with: moments and memories, we reveal out from the past-unknown sides of big personalities, who left their indelible traces in time and history…

By Efi Michalarou

Marc Quinn was born in London in 8/1/64, hestudied history and history of art at Robinson College, Cambridge before becoming an assistant of the sculptor Barry Flanagan. There he learnt the techniques of sculpture and casting that were to form a major part of his oeuvre in the years that followed. Quinn is often associated with the Young British Artists (YBAs), a movement that emerged in the early ‘90s and includes artists as: Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. He is one of very few who did not graduate from Goldsmith’s BA fine art course, yet his place is cemented by his being the first meber of YBAr to be signed by Jay Jopling, the English art dealer whose gallery, the White Cube in London, plays host to many of the major works created by members of the movement. His inclusion in Saatchi’s exhibition “Sensation” (18/9-28/12/97), which took place at the Royal Academy of Art in London and later toured to Berlin and New York, an event considered as the point at which the YBAs became universally recognized ans is also considered proof of his affiliation with the group. Marc Quinn shares the devotion of YBA to Conceptual Art, exploration of media and what has been described as the use of “shock tactics” to challenge audiences’ understanding of art, the everyday and life itself. Mark Quinn first came to public attention with his work “Self”, an ongoing project first conceived and carried out in 1991. The piece is a sculpture of Quinn’s head made with 9 liters of frozen blood taken from the artist himself. He has since made a new version of the sculpture every five years, cataloguing the aging process, and the work has become one of his most iconic pieces. Inspired by the self-portraiture of Rembrandt, Quinn claims that he chose blood as his medium “To push portraiture to an extreme”. In 2000 in an exhibition, housed in the Fondazione Prada in Milan, admittedly featured a series of human sculptures in marble. Reminiscent of Roman and Greek statuary, these feature four men and four women, all missing various limbs either from birth or from accidents, in an exploration of the relationship between the integrity of the soul and of the body that would become a major feature of his work over the years that followed. It also featured the “Continuous Present”, a human skull that rotates around a reflective steel cylinder at a rate of one revolution every thirty minutes. The center of the exhibition was “Garden”, a frozen garden full of plants (100 diferent specimens) which could never grow together kept in cryogenic suspension. In an interview, Quinn said “The flowers become an image of perfect flower, because in the reality their matter is dead and they are suspended in a state of transformation between pure image and pure matter”. In 2001, Quinn combined science and artistic techniques to create a new work, commissioned by the Natural Portrait Gallery. He was given the task of creating a portrait of the Nobel Prize winner John E. Sulston, in recognition of the scientist’s work in sequencing the human genome. To do so, DNA was taken from Sulston, split into segments and then inserted into bacteria. These bacteria were then allowed to thrive on a plate of agar jelly, creating the work “Sir John Edward Sulston”. A colossal sculpture for the Fourth Plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square, which, in a project first conceived in 1998, is used to display a series of sculptures. Marc Quinn was the first to be commissioned, creating “Alison Lapper Pregnant”. The 15 ton statue in marble presents Alison Lapper, an artist born without arms and with severely shortened legs. It caused huge controversy both before and after its unveiling, with concern that disability would not be shown in a sensitive light. Since 2005, Quinn’s work has continued to explore the human body, the questions of individuality and our relationship with nature and the universe around us. Much of his work has continued to explore themes and ideas used earlier in his career. In keeping with his exploration of the passage of time in his “Self” sculptures, Marc Quinn created a series of eight pink marble sculptures, each depicting a different stage in the growth of a human as it develops from an embryo to a fully formed child, in a collection entitled “Evolution”. Quinn sees the “Skeleton” series as representative of an everyman, an abstraction of a person since it is the part of the body which transcends death. Two series, “In the Night Garden” and “The Winter Garden”, created for the Fondazione Prada, in a number of brightly colured oil on canvas paintings painted between 2009 and 2011. In addition, Quinn created a series of huge marble flower heads. Most famous, however, are his sculptures of the model Kate Moss, first begun in 2006. These sculptures, most often rendered in painted or lacquered bronze, depict the famous model in a variety of yoga positions, such as “Sphinx”. These culminated in a life-size statue in solid 18-carat gold entitled “Siren”. One of his key works is “Mirage” a life-size bronze figure, referencing an image of a prisoner of Abu Ghraib, which went through the media around the globe in 2004. It looks like an image of a veiled Christ, an image of forgiveness as well as a subliminal crucifixion. The fact that the person’s head is covered gives it a kind of mystery. Moreover, for Quinn, Mirage also references Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War. “It has all these references, but at the same time, it is a contemporary image. You have a real moment of suffering and suddenly it becomes a two-dimensional image; and then, with the sculpture, it is brought back into three dimensions. This is like turning an image back into an object”. The unique site-specific sculpture “All of Nature Flows Through Us”, an eye cast in bronze, is more that 10 metres in diameter and weighs more than 12 tones. Installed in the river at Kistefos in Norway, the work interacts with nature in a highly dramatic manner and can be seen as an epitome of Marc’s diverse and poetic work. The “Archaeology of Art” sculptures are based on the forms of real shells – the most perfect pre-existing sculptural ‘readymades’ in our natural world. The found forms are enlarged using a 3D printer and cast in aluminium, concrete, stainless steel or bronze. Quinn polishes the inside of the shells to a high sheen, contrasting with their heavily textured surfaces. His latest series “Toxic Sublime” series are distorted, three-dimensional ‘landscapes’ that blur the boundaries between painting and sculpture. They begin with an inherently contradictory artistic process whereby Quinn submits a photograph printed on canvas of a sublime sunrise over a beach to a process of disintegration, alteration and decay.