Sculptures, paintings, and other art objects by one of the most original Young British Artists in an unparalleled exhibition catalog. Published on the occasion of the exhibition at the 55th Venice Biennale, this catalog gathers a number of works by this renowned British artist. It is “a journey from the origins of life” that, according to the artist, through very powerful works celebrates “the awe and wonder of the world in which we live.”
Marc Quinn began his career exploring issues such as the relationship between art and science, the human body and its survival mechanisms, life and its preservation, and beauty and death. Through an interview of the artist with the editor Germano Celant, the volume offers in-depth insight into Quinn's conceptual practice, which incorporates sculpture, painting, and installations. The artist's preoccupation with the metamorphic ability of both human life and nature points to his fascination with our innate spirituality. Quinn questions the codes of nature through his adoption of uncompromising materials, such as ice, blood, marble, glass, and lead. Through the use of such materials, his works are at once poetic and confrontational and explore life, death, sexuality, and religion. Quinn transforms the very act of seeing by forcing viewers to question what is around them, pushing them into the unknown in order to rediscover life.
Internationally known for his writings on Arte Povera, Germano Celant has been a contributing editor at Artforum since 1977 and at Interview since 1991. The director of Fondazione Prada, Milan, since 1995, Celant is also curator of Fondazione Aldo Rossi in Milan and of Fondazione Emilio e Annabianca Vedova in Venice.
Published by nai010 publishers. Essays by Sue-an van der Zijpp and Rod Mengham.
The British artist Marc Quinn, born in 1964, came to the attention of the international art scene in 1991 with Self, a cast of his own head realized in eight pints of his own frozen blood, exhibited in a specially designed refrigeration unit. Since 1999, he has been creating sculptures in classic white marble of subjects who lack one or more limbs; the best known is his 2005 Trafalgar Square installation, Alison Lapper Pregnant. In addressing the purely physical aspects of life, Quinn confronts the viewer with the gaping chasm between the physical and the mental, beauty and ugliness, the eternal and the mortal. His work has been presented and acquired by leading galleries and museums around the world and was recently the subject of an exhibition at Mary Boone Gallery in New York. This overview of recent developments also includes a history of his career and documentation of all major works.
Published by Fondazione Prada. Essays by Germano Celant, Darian Leader. Foreword by Miuccia Prada.
Through his use of such unorthodox materials as bread, blood, excrement, silicon, ice, and, more recently, plants and flowers, Marc Quinn works with the fundamental constituents of our existence. His analysis of the physical nature of the body and the mysteries associated with it are expanded in this novel kaleidoscope of a book. Containing images of classical sculptures, old paintings, scenes of war, disasters, car and plane crashes, portraits of disabled people, works by other contemporary artists, scientific photographs, and a selection of works and photographs by Quinn himself, this book constitutes a fascinating, associative approach to a body of work which concerns questions that often have no answers. Included are critical essays, an interview with the artist, and conversations between him and the people portrayed in his sculptures.
Marc Quinn
Marc Quinn