Marc Quinn Essay

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Marc Quinn is one of the most interesting and compelling artists working today. He was born in London in 1964, graduated from Cambridge University and started working as a sculptor from 1984. The British artist was part of the group known as Britartists or YBAs (Young British Artists). Quinn is famous for his "discussion-generating" artworks using both innovative materials, like blood, ice or excrement and scientific developments to make art. His work refers to traditional genres of art such as portraiture, landscape and still life however he uses new techniques and methods to represent it for example refrigeration. Moreover he concentrates his projects on the mutability of the body and the dualisms that define human life: spiritual and physical, surface and depth, cerebral and sexual. With the use of a large variety of materials and techniques he develops these paradoxes into experimental, conceptual works that are mostly figurative in form. The works that brought him into the larger public consciousness were “Self” (1991), a cast of the artist's head made from 4.5 liters of his own blood; Garden (2000) a frozen display of blooming flowers; and “Alison Lapper Pregnant” (2005-2007) a sculpture of his mutilated friend which has been installed on the Fourth Plinth at Trafalgar Square.
He has been critically acclaimed both locally in London, where he lives and works, and abroad being included in numerous exhibitions or in solo exhibitions around the world. Shows such as the Sydney Biennale in 1992, Young British Artists II at the Saatchi Gallery in 1993 and Sensation! at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1997, Give and Take, Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2001), 50th Venice Biennale (2003) and solo’s like Fondazione Prada, Milan (2000), Tate Liverpool (2002), Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2004), MACRO, Rome (2006), DHC/ART Fondation pour l’art contemporain,

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