Marc Quinn
Marc Quinn
YBA Sculptor: Self; Alison Lapper Pregnant
Born in London in 1964, Quinn studied at Cambridge University before returning to London to establish his career as an artist. Quinn came to prominence in the early 1990s with his sculpture Self (a sculpture of his head made with 4.5 litres of his own frozen blood). He is often grouped with the YBAs or Young British Artists.
Although Quinn is known as a sculptor, he has also produced paintings, prints and photographic work. His use of non-traditional materials speaks to his interest in understanding the profundities of the corporeal body and the abundance of nature, in their beauty and their messy reality.
Some of his most famous artwork includes Alison Lapper Pregnant (sculpture of a thalidomide-affected woman born with no arms and severely shortened legs), Garden (a garden full of plants kept in cryogenic suspension), a portrait of Nobel Prize winner John E. Sulston (consists of bacteria containing Sulston's DNA in agar jelly.), Man in the Mirror (a marble head of Michael Jackson placed on the ground so to look like it's emerging from under the floor), and Siren (an 18 carat gold sculpture of the supermodel Kate Moss).
A sensitive exponent of the art of anatomy and of issues relating to the subject of mortality, his sculptures take the viewer into a territory that both stretches our understanding of what it is to be human and of what sculpture itself can be. He has used blood, ice, and feces to make sculptures and his work sometimes refers to scientific developments. 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.
His work has been exhibited at numerous international museums and galleries such as the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou, MCA in Chicago, and the Fondazione Prada in Italy.
London's prestigious White Cube contemporary art gallery exhibits his work along with other internationally recognized artists.
Quinn is married to author Georgia Byng and has two children.
Marc Quinn Official Website