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Thursday 6 February

Marc Quinn: Mortal Bodies and Immortal Souls

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, Marc Quinn (born in 1964) is undoubtedly the British artist who has most challenged our certainties about the human body since the 1990s. Here’s a man who doesn’t hesitate to have nearly 5 liters of blood extracted every five years to create his frozen self-portrait “Self”, a sculpted head kept artificially alive at -18°C thanks to a sophisticated refrigeration system. A brutal and uncompromising metaphor of our existential fragility that directly connects us to Martin Heidegger’s reflections on being-toward-death. Quinn confronts us with our finitude with a clinical coldness that matches the one required to preserve his blood.

Life and death constantly intertwine in his work, like two sides of the same coin that he keeps spinning before our eyes. His work reveals an almost morbid obsession with preserving the living, as evidenced by his monumental installation “Garden” (2000) at the Prada Foundation in Milan: thousands of flowers frozen for eternity in silicone at -20°C. A still life in the most literal sense, bringing us back to Schopenhauer’s thoughts on the vanity of all things and the illusion of permanence. These flowers are both dead and immortal, artificially preserved in a state of perfection that defies time but remains dependent on an electrical outlet. Quinn thus constantly plays with our contradictions, mocking our desire for eternity while highlighting our dependence on technology.

This duality between life and death is also found in his DNA portrait series, notably that of Nobel Prize winner Sir John Sulston, created from his genetic material grown in agar gel. The work perfectly embodies the tension between individual uniqueness encoded in our DNA and the universality of our biological condition. It’s a paradoxical self-portrait that shows nothing of the subject’s physical appearance while literally containing the instructions to recreate them entirely.

But it is perhaps in his series of white marble sculptures of disabled people that Quinn reaches the pinnacle of his reflection on body and beauty. His monumental statue of Alison Lapper pregnant, displayed on the fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square between 2005 and 2007, represented a real shock to the London landscape. By placing a woman born without arms facing Admiral Nelson’s column, himself missing an arm, Quinn masterfully overturns the codes of classical statuary and our prejudices about disability. Here he follows in the line of Michel Foucault’s reflections on the relationship between power and bodily norms, directly questioning what our society considers “normal” or “abnormal”.

This series, entitled “The Complete Marbles”, includes several sculptures of people born with missing limbs or amputees. Using white Carrara marble, the noble material par excellence of classical sculpture, Quinn elevates these “incomplete” bodies to the status of icons. He forces viewers to confront their own prejudices about beauty and physical perfection. These works are not celebrations of difference but affirmations of human dignity in all its manifestations.

Provocation in Quinn’s work is never gratuitous – it always serves a deeper philosophical purpose about our relationship with body and identity. Take his series of gold sculptures of Kate Moss in impossible yoga positions: behind the apparent celebration of a pop icon lies a fierce critique of our society of spectacle and its new totems. Quinn transforms the model’s body into a kind of contemporary idol, joining Guy Debord’s analyses of the commodification of bodies and the tyranny of images. “Siren” (2008), his 18-carat gold sculpture of Kate Moss, is a modern Venus that questions our new cults and new values.

His work on transsexuals and extreme body modifications pushes this reflection on fluid identity even further. Through his hyperrealistic sculptures of Buck Angel and Allanah Starr, Quinn questions the boundaries between masculine and feminine, natural and artificial. He doesn’t judge, he exposes – with a clinical precision reminiscent of Renaissance anatomical plates. But where Renaissance artists sought to understand how the human body worked, Quinn questions what it means to be human in the age of plastic surgery and synthetic hormones.

This exploration of bodily transformations culminates in his series of sculptures of people who have radically modified their appearance, like “Cat Man” Dennis Avner who had himself surgically transformed to look like a feline. Quinn documents these voluntary metamorphoses with the same objectivity he applies to his other subjects, forcing us to reflect on the limits of personal identity and bodily autonomy. These works pose the dizzying question: how far can we go in modifying our body while remaining ourselves?

The artist stops at nothing to make us uncomfortable, as with his raw meat paintings from the “Flesh Paintings” series. These bloody still lifes evoke Rembrandt’s flayed figures but also Francis Bacon’s carcasses, creating a fascinating dialogue between pictorial tradition and contemporary art. Quinn forces us to face what we usually prefer to ignore: the raw materiality of our existence, our deeply carnal nature.

Flesh, whether human or animal, is omnipresent in his work. In “The Way of the Flesh” (2013), he juxtaposes the naked body of a pregnant woman with pieces of raw meat, creating a disturbing visual tension between gestating life and dead flesh. This monumental work of over 5 meters long confronts us with our own ambivalence towards meat consumption and our condition as beings of flesh.

His exploration of the limits of the human body takes a particularly radical turn with his giant marble embryo sculptures from the “Evolution” series. By disproportionately enlarging these barely sketched forms of life, Quinn creates an effect of defamiliarization that makes us see the miracle of life differently. Here he joins Peter Sloterdijk’s questionings about anthropotechnics and the future of humans in the age of genetic manipulation. These monumental embryos are like modern sphinxes questioning us about our future as a species.

Quinn is also a relentless chronicler of our time, as shown by his “History Paintings” series begun in 2009. These monumental paintings and tapestries reproducing news photos – riots, demonstrations, disasters – transform the media flow into contemporary frescoes. The artist follows a tradition that goes back to great history paintings, but adopting Walter Benjamin’s disenchanted view of history as an accumulation of ruins.

This political dimension of his work has intensified in recent years. His “Our Blood” project (2019) involving the collection of blood from thousands of donors, half of whom are refugees, demonstrates his growing engagement with social issues. By literally mixing the blood of refugees and non-refugees, Quinn creates a powerful metaphor for our common humanity.

His latest project, “A Surge of Power (Jen Reid)” stealthily installed on the plinth of Edward Colston’s toppled statue in Bristol in 2020, demonstrates his ability to intervene in public debate in a striking way. By replacing the statue of a slave trader with that of a Black Lives Matter activist, Quinn doesn’t just comment on current events – he actively participates in rewriting history and its symbols.

More recently still, his exhibition “Light into Life” at Kew Gardens (2024) marks a new turn in his practice. His monumental polished steel sculptures reflecting the surrounding nature create a fascinating dialogue between the artificial and the natural. This series, inspired by medicinal plants, explores our complex relationship with nature – between exploitation and preservation, destruction and regeneration.

Quinn transforms complex philosophical questions into visually striking works that directly challenge us. Whether working with blood, marble, or frozen flowers, he always manages to create images that leave a lasting impression in our memory while raising fundamental questions about our condition. His art is like a distorting mirror that reflects back to us an image both familiar and strangely disturbing of ourselves.

This ability to combine visual provocation and conceptual depth makes Quinn a unique artist in the contemporary landscape. His works don’t just shock – they force us to reflect on essential questions: what is identity in the age of body modification? What is the status of the body in a technological society? How can we represent difference without falling into voyeurism or complacency?

Marc Quinn appears as one of the most important artists of his generation, precisely because he doesn’t seek to please us but to make us think. In a contemporary art world often more concerned with artist ratings than meaning, his approach maintains a rare radicality and relevance. He reminds us that art isn’t there to decorate our walls but to confront us with what we are – in all our beauty and monstrosity.

For the snobs who might still think that contemporary art is just a big joke, I would say that Quinn represents exactly the opposite: an artist who uses all means at his disposal to question the great issues of our time. His works aren’t gadgets meant to impress the gallery but thinking machines that continue to work on us long after we’ve seen them. While our world seems to have lost its bearings, his work offers us not ready-made answers but essential questions about what it means to be human in the 21st century.

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