Marc Quinn
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- You may also be looking for the America baseball player Mark Quinn
Marc Quinn (born 1964) is a British artist, best known for Alison Lapper Pregnant, a statue of Alison Lapper currently installed on the fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square, and Self, a sculpture of his own head made from his own frozen blood. He is one of the Young British Artists (YBAs).
Quinn was born in London. He studied history and the history of art at Cambridge University, (attending Robinson College), and 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). He emerged in the early 1990s. He was one of the first artists represented by Jay Jopling, and was exhibited in Charles Saatchi's defining Sensation exhibition of 1997, which gave establishment endorsement to the movement.
Like his near contemporary Antony Gormley, Quinn often uses his own body to cast his sculptures. Unlike Gormley, however, Quinn retains distinguishing features. He uses unusual materials such as rubber, and presents his sculptures in unconventional ways: the No Visible Means of Escape series, for example, are rubber casts of Quinn's body, some split from the feet to the neck, and hung from the feet.
Quinn's signature piece in the art world is Self (1991, recast 1996), a sculpture of the artist's head made from 4.5 litres (9.5 US pints) of his own frozen blood which was taken from his body over a period of five months.
Self, like many other pieces by the YBAs, was bought by Charles Saatchi (in 1991 for a reputed £13,000). The press carried stories 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 December 2004 Saatchi sold his most iconic YBA work, Hirst's "shark", and during the next year several other important pieces followed. Amongst them was Self, which went to a US collector in April 2005 for £1.5m. [1]
As well as modelling himself, Quinn has made a series of sculptures of people either born with limbs missing or who have had them amputated. His portrait of John Sulston, who worked 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 is on prominent display on a plinth in Trafalgar Square in front of the National Gallery.
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.
He is married to author Georgia Byng and has two children.
