Marc Quinn
dal 30/6/2004 al 12/9/2004
Segnalato da
30/6/2004
Marc Quinn
Irish Museum of Modern Art - IMMA, Dublin
The first solo exhibition in Ireland by British artist Marc Quinn, best known for his strikingly original sculptures based on the human body. Flesh presents 14 new sculptures cast, in this instance, from the meat of various animals.
Marc Quinn at the Irish Museum of Modern Art
The first solo exhibition in Ireland by British artist Marc Quinn, best known for his strikingly original sculptures based on the human body, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Thursday 1 July 2004. Marc Quinn: Flesh presents 14 new sculptures cast, in this instance, from the meat of various animals. Despite this new medium, Quinn's recurring themes - of life and death, heroism and suffering and man's physical and psychological boundaries - persist to powerful effect. Quinn's original and affecting treatment of these universal concerns and his unfailing resourcefulness in his means of expressing them have made him one of the most important of that generation of artists who acquired celebrity status in the 1980s and '90s as yBas (young British artists).
The exhibition is presented in partnership with the British Council.
Moulded from cuts of meat and cast in bronze with black patina, the works in Flesh are formally displayed on white plinths to heighten their relationship to art historical figurative sculpture, another defining feature of Quinn's work. Titles such as Reclining Figure (Venison), 2004, Torso (Lamb), 2003, and Standing Figure (Beef), 2004, all evoke classical and modern sculpture. The poses are also familiar, from the compactness of the Pietà -like scene in Mother and Child (Rabbit and Lamb), 2004, to Torso (Stag), 2004, with its clear echoes of the stretched torso of a Rodin centauress.
The works also have a remarkable sense of life, well beyond their animal origins. In the words of art critic Darian Leader, "they appeal and call out to us. This meat really has become us ... They create the sense of a human body more powerfully than any direct representation of the human body. " The curator of the exhibition, Rachael Thomas, Acting Head of Exhibitions at IMMA, describes Quinn's art "as one that exalts nature and expresses humanistic themes. The exhibition explores the boundaries and bridges between life and death, our beginning and our mortal end."
Flesh is the latest chapter in an extraordinary inventive catalogue of work, which first came to prominence in the late 1980s with Quinn's figures of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, modeled in dough, baked in an oven and then cast in bronze. In 1991, Self, a cast of his head in nine pints of his own frozen blood, became a modern icon. His 1995 series of lead sculptures entitled, Emotional Detox: The Seven Deadly Sins, was once again based on his own body, revealing a preoccupation with heightened states of bodily expression. The glass Morphology, 1996, series and his later Nervous Breakdown, 1997, sculptures both reinforced his continuing interest in transgressive states of the bodily form. In 1999 Quinn began a series of sculptural portraits of amputees in white Italian marble, creating an extraordinarily celebratory and dignified body of work. One of these works, Alison Lapper Pregnant, has recently been chosen to occupy the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, London.
Born in 1964, Marc Quinn graduated from Cambridge University in 1985 and then became an assistant to sculptor Barry Flanagan, now a resident of Dublin. He first showed with Jay Jopling in 1988 and since then has exhibited extensively in Britain and internationally, with solo exhibitions at the Tate Gallery, London (1995); the Kunstverein Hanover, Germany (1999); the Funadazione Prada, Milan (2000); Tate Liverpool (2003) and the Venice Biennale (2003).
A publication, with a foreword by Enrique Juncosa, Director, IMMA, and essays by Susie Orbach, writer, Darian Leader, critic, and Rachael Thomas, Acting Head of Exhibitions, IMMA, accompanies the exhibition.
The following talks and events have been organised to coincide with the exhibition.
Discussion Wednesday 30 June at 4.30pm
Artist Marc Quinn discusses his work in conversation with Tim Marlow, Director of Exhibitions, White Cube
Gallery Talk Sunday 25 July at 3.00pm
A guided introductory tour presented by Rachael Thomas, Acting Head of Exhibitions, IMMA
Film Programme Wednesdays 3.00pm - 4.00pm
Sundays 3.30pm - 4.30pm
Life Support, a film by Marc Quinn and Gerald Fox will be shown during the exhibition
Marc Quinn: Flesh continues in the New Galleries until 12 September 2004.
Admission is free.
Opening Hours : Tue - Sat 10.00am - 5.30pm
Sun and Bank Holidays 12 noon - 5.30pm
Closed Mondays
For further information and colour and black and white images please contact Monica Cullinane or Patrice Molloy at Tel : + 353 1 612 9900, Fax : +353 1 612 9999
Irish Museum of Modern Art
Royal Hospital
Military Road
Kilmainham
Dublin 8
Ireland