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Quinn's bronze sculpture: The Big Bang Pop

Marc Quinn (born 1964) is a British artist, best known for Alison Lapper Pregnant, a statue of Alison Lapper which has been installed on the fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square, self, a sculpture of his head made with his own frozen blood, and "Garden" (2000). He is one of the Young British Artists (YBAs).

Life and work

Quinn was born in London. He studied history and the history of art at Robinson College, Cambridge. He worked as an assistant to the sculptor Barry Flanagan.

He was not represented in the 1988 Damien Hirst-curated Freeze exhibition which brought the YBAs together for the first time (although he did at one time share a flat with Hirst). Quinn emerged in the early 1990s. He was the first artist represented by Jay Jopling, and was exhibited in Charles Saatchi's defining Sensation.

Quinn's signature piece in the art world is Self (1991), a frozen sculpture of the artist's head made from 4.5 litres (9.5 US pints) of his own blood, taken from his body over a period of 5 months.

Self, like many other pieces by the YBAs, was bought by Charles Saatchi (in 1991 for a reputed £13,000). The press reported in 2002 that the sculpture had been destroyed by builders employed to expand the kitchen for Saatchi's partner, the celebrity chef Nigella Lawson, when they unplugged the freezer in which it was being stored (it has to be kept at -12C/10F). This would seem to have been unfounded, however, as the piece was exhibited intact by Saatchi when he opened his new gallery in London in 2003. In April, 2005, Self was sold to a US collector for £1.5m. ¹

His next important piece in terms of public profile was the frozen garden he made for Miuccia Prada in the year 2000. A whole garden full of plants which could never grow together kept in cryogenic suspension.

Quinn has also made a series of marble sculptures of people either born with limbs missing or who have had them amputated. This culminated in the 15 ton marble statue of Alison Lapper, a woman who was born with no arms and severely shortened legs, which sits on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in London.

His portrait of John Sulston, who won the Nobel prize for sequencing the human genome on the Human Genome Project, is in the National Portrait Gallery. It consists of bacteria containing Sulston's DNA in agar jelly.

Since 2005 Quinn has become known to the general public for his sculpture of Alison Lapper, which was on prominent display on a plinth in Trafalgar Square in front of the National Gallery. It has been changed with a sculpture by Thomas Schütte.

In April 2006, Sphinx, a sculpture of Kate Moss by Quinn was revealed ². The sculpture shows Moss in a yoga position with her ankles and arms wrapped behind her ears. This body of work culminated in an exhibition at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York in May 2007.

In August 2008, Quinn unveiled another sculpture of Kate Moss, this time in solid gold.

He is married to author Georgia Byng and has two children³

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Marc Quinn

• Official Marc Quinn website
• Profile page at the BBC
• Quinn at Sculpture.org.uk
• Profile at the White Cube
• BBC report on Alison Lapper Pregnant
• Pictures of Alison Lapper Pregnant
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• [4]

References