Marc Quinn is a leading contemporary artist, who first came to prominence in 1991 with his sculpture ‘Self’, a cast of the artist’s own head made purely of his own blood, frozen and kept at sub-zero temperatures by its refrigerated display cabinet.
Quinn’s artworks explore what it is to be a person living in the world, whether its concerns man’s relationship with nature, or what identity and beauty mean and why people are compelled to transform their own. Other key subjects include cycles of growth, nature and evolution through topical issues such as genetics and the manipulation of DNA, as well as issues of life and death and identity.
Quinn was the first artist represented by Jay Jopling, founder of White Cube Gallery. His work went on to be exhibited alongside other YBA artists at Saatchi’s exhibition, ‘Sensation’ in 1997. Quinn produced a solid gold sculpture of the model Kate Moss in 2008, which was on display at The British Museum, and even more famously produced ‘Alison Lapper Pregnant’, a fifteen-ton marble statue of Alison Lapper, a pregnant disabled woman which was exhibited on the fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square, and which was later replicated as part of the London 2012 Paralympics Opening Ceremony.
