press release

Marc Quinn

Fondazione Prada

Milan

May - June 2000

The exhibition being presented at the Fondazione Prada in Milan from May to June 2000 is dedicated to the English artist Marc Quinn (born in London, 1964), one of the most interesting exponents of “Young British Art”. What the artists who comprise this group - some forty in all, including Quinn - have in common is a radical and transgressive spirit; they represent a situation of particular vitality in the contemporary art of the last decade, that has helped to catapult young British art onto the international scene. The arrival of “YBA”, as an internationally recognized phenomenon of our time, was consecrated by the major review of their work at the “Sensation” show presented at the Royal Academy of Art in London in 1997 and at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York in 1999.
The exhibition, being held at the Fondazione Prada, was conceived by Marc Quinn; it is in fact his first one-man show in Italy. It presents three new works dedicated to the attempt to find a form of art that may transcend the limits of the body and of nature, as defined by our conception of the beautiful and our subordination to the constraints of time.

After graduating in history and history of art at Cambridge University, Quinn began his career as a sculptor in 1984 in London, where he now lives and works. In the late Eighties he produced a series of busts in bread dough, which he baked and then cast in bronze to create the portraits of historical personages, such as Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, or fictional characters like Dr.Pangloss in Voltaire’s “Candide”. In 1991 he exhibited in a London gallery the sculpture that made him internationally famous: Self, a meditation on mortality inspired by a cast of the face of William Blake. It was produced with nine pints of the artist’s own blood (equivalent to some 5 litres), extracted over a period of five months. Poured into a silicone model of Quinn’s head, the blood was frozen and placed in a transparent perspex cube connected to a refrigerator to maintain the solid state of the fluids that compose the work and thus slow down the inevitable corruption of its organic material over time.
In 1995 he presented his sculptural group Emotional Detox: The Seven Deadly Sins at the Tate Gallery in London. Realized in lead and wax, the group consists of seven torsos modelled from the artist’s body, head and hands. The title of the work, which has autobiographical resonance, refers to the detoxication of the body from all poisons and the purification of the soul by overcoming negative propensities.
In 1998 Quinn began to produce human figures in ice, placed in refrigerated containers of stainless steel and glass, such as Love is all around you (1999), representing a couple kissing. The sculpture is destined to disappear by a slow process of evaporation, in such a way that the vaporized particles are all around and in the viewers. In the same year the artist began to experiment with the immersion of fresh flowers in silicone contained in transparent glass-cases wired up to refrigerating units and kept as a constant temperature of approximately minus 20°. By this technique he produces flowers frozen in full bloom, which appear to be caught in a state of perpetual freshness, suspended between growth (they are cut) and decay (they do not wither).

Quinn has exhibited his works in England, Europe and the United States. He participated in the Sidney Biennial in 1992. In London he has shown his work in “Sensation” at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1997. One-man shows of his work have been held in London in 1988 and again in 1991. Other one-man shows have been held in Paris and Washington in 1990, in Athens in 1993, in Amsterdam in 1994, in 1995 at the Tate Gallery in London, in New York and at the South London Gallery in 1998, and at the Kunstverein in Hanover in 1999.

In his work the artist explores the visual and temporal confines of the living material, human and natural, which may expand to comprehend different or unforeseen dimensions of existence and imagination. In this sense the discovery of an atemporal condition of nature - the flowers that never fade of Eternal Spring (1998) - may be combined with the transmutation of the inside of human bodies into a concrete and enduring dimension - the series of positive/negative plaster-casts of the artist in the nude of No Visible Means of Escape (1996-1997). Both aspects may establish an invisible bridge between external image and internal humours, such as blood and fluids that, once frozen in time, create a nature and a body that had hitherto been invisible to us in their absolute beauty. “I am dealing thus with the fundamental mysteries of existence - says Quinn - the enigma of birth and death. It concerns us all in a direct way. And since there are no answers, our questions must always return to this theme”.*
In the artist’s vision, living beings are a source of matter destined to be transformed. And the element into which they are transmuted is sufficiently fertile to transcend the constraints of its own matter. It is capable of being reconverted into any kind of extreme image, such as the astonishing bodies of Peter Hull (1999) and James Gillespie (1999) portrayed according to the “medium” of classic sculpture. In his sculptures, the raw materials - from ice to bread, from blood to faeces, from lead to silicone, from wax to marble - are variants that point to the fluid borderline between life and death, between real and apparent life, between temporal dimension and eternity. “I am interested not so much in substance as such - the artist affirms - but in the manner in which a corporeal substance is transformed into something spiritual. I am fascinated by the object’s boundaries (...) I am interested in how such a substance can transcend itself and is transformed into a living body”.*

For the occasion of the exhibition, the Fondazione Prada is publishing a volume conceived by Marc Quinn in relation to the works on display. It contains an essay and an interview by Germano Celant with the artist, texts by Simon Schama and Darian Leader, a biography and bibliography, and an extensive apparatus of plates.

* From the conversation of Karlheinz Lüdeking with the artist, “Kunstforum International”, Bonn 1999.

exhibition info

press release n.1

Milan,16 March 2000

Milan,16 March 2000