Marc Quinn
dal 4/10/2007 al 5/1/2008
Segnalato da
4/10/2007
Marc Quinn
DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art, Montreal
His work is principally concerned with the body's mutability in time, its physical presence in space and its anxiety within culture. His work also poignantly explores mortality, beauty, kinship and the interplay of art and science. It ranges across a variety of media - from sculpture to painting, drawing and photography - and includes dazzling, if contentious, frozen self-portraits cast from his own head and filled with his own blood to stunning frozen portraits of his infant sons made with their respective placentas and umbilical chords.
Solo exhibition
Curated by John Zeppetelli
Gathering over forty recent works, DHC/ART's inaugural exhibition by conceptual
artist Marc Quinn is the largest ever mounted in North America and the artist's
first solo show in Canada. Marc Quinn is a central figure within British art whose
work is principally concerned with the body's mutability in time, its physical
presence in space and its anxiety within culture. His work also poignantly explores
mortality, beauty, kinship and the interplay of art and science.
Marc Quinn's work ranges across a variety of media - from sculpture to painting,
drawing and photography - and includes dazzling, if contentious, frozen
self-portraits cast from his own head and filled with his own blood to stunning
frozen portraits of his infant sons made with their respective placentas and
umbilical chords. The latest of these, Sky, is included in this exhibition.
Quinn's The Complete Marbles, a suite of sculptural portraits of amputees and
disabled individuals in sparkling white marble allude to fragmented Greco-Roman
statuary while slyly addressing heroism. Quinn has made DNA portraits of his family
and of scientist John Sulston, paintings of improbable gardens, and highly evocative
wax castings of people with life-threatening illnesses -- Chemical Life Support --
where the wax is mixed with daily doses of the medications that keep the individuals
alive. Another wax portrait of a serene young woman Beauty and the Beast is colored
darkly by animal blood.
Digitally manipulated animal flesh is the basis for two stunning Mirror Paintings on
view, as well as for Cybernetically Engineered, Cloned and Grown Rabbit, a seven
foot bronze sculpture, at once comic and melancholy, of a shaped rabbit carcass.
Quinn has arrested the decay of flowers by immersing them in sub-zero silicone and
made painted bronze sculptures of supermodel Kate Moss in extreme contortions. Other
bronzes include a series of human skeletons, among them The Selfish Gene, which
depicts a couple in the throes of love-making.
In 2004 Marc Quinn won a major public art commission for the Fourth Plinth: his
Alison Lapper Pregnant, a large marble portrait of a naked, severely disabled and
very pregnant woman was installed in London’s Trafalgar Square -- a bold and
powerful tribute to both disability and motherhood.
A fully illustrated catalogue with essays by British art historian Lynda Nead and
Montreal psychoanalyst Harvey Giesbrecht accompanies the exhibition.
Bio
Marc Quinn was born in London in 1964. He studied History of Art at Cambridge
University (1982-85) and began working as a sculptor in 1984. Marc Quinn is
represented by White Cube, London and Mary Boone Gallery, New York. His work is in
numerous museum and private collections around the world.
DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art
451 rue St-Jean - Montreal