Marc Quinn

Marc Quinn – A self portrait of frozen blood

Marc Quinn was born in London on 8 January 1964. The son of a French mother and a British father, he spent his childhood in Paris where his father worked as a physicist for the International Office of Weights and Measures. The scientific measuring instruments in his father’s laboratory held a great fascination for the young Marc Quinn and awakened his interest in the functionality of things. After attending private school, he studied history and art history in Cambridge until 1985. When his former housemate Damien Hirst curated the much-acclaimed exhibition Freeze - sometimes considered the birth of the Young British Artists – Quinn himself was not represented but he is nevertheless attributed to this movement. Quinn’s artistic breakthrough came in the 1990s with his first exhibition held at Jay Jopling’s gallery. Quinn caused a considerable sensation with his work Self, a frozen sculpture of his own head made of 4.5 litres of blood, for which the artist himself had bled for a period of five months. 

Unusual sculptures awaken great interest

Marc Quinn held his first solo exhibition in the Tate Britain in 1995 in which he presented works from his Art Now series. In 1997 he took part in Charles Saatchi’s exhibition Sensation which generated a great deal of media coverage due to the many provocative artworks, and set a new attendance record for contemporary art. Further solo exhibitions followed in London, Hannover and Milan. Quinn created a frozen garden for the fashion designer Miuccia Prada in which he conserved plants at low temperatures. He paid tribute to the famous biologist and Nobel Prize winner John E. Sulston with a ‘genomic portrait’ consisting of bacteria containing Sulston’s DNA embedded in agar jelly. He also created a series of marble sculptures showing human bodies with missing body parts, the most famous of which was presented in Trafalgar Square in London in 2004 depicting the naked body of the artist Alison Lapper who was born without arms and shortened legs. 

The complicated relationship between life and matter

As an artist, Marc Quinn is primarily interested in the human body and its form, including all its shortcomings. While on the one hand he takes and reproduces shapes, on the other hand there is a deliberate deformation that sets new accents and draws fresh connections. Marc Quinn takes completely new steps in his choice of materials: As well as his own blood, he also created a Shit Head out of faeces and other sculptures in bread and cast in bronze. The great question at the centre of Marc Quinn’s art is that of the nature and meaning of life itself. Life cannot be separated from matter for Quinn – and thus experimentation with matter becomes the core of his artistic work. From the body’s own materials to plants and flesh and classical marble, Quinn has worked with an enormously wide spectrum of substances. Since 2009, motifs from human history have also found their way into his work.