Marc Quinn, Wilder Shores of Desire, 2011. Courtesy Private Collection. Photo Jonty Wilde.
WAKEFIELD.- This summer, Yorkshire Sculpture Park presents the work of Marc Quinn, one of the leading artists of his generation, in the Formal Garden. Quinn’s Cybernetically Engineered Cloned and Grown Rabbit, 2004 and Wilder Shores of Desire, 2011, are shown alongside work by fellow Young British Artist Tracey Emin.
Quinn's sculptures demonstrate his interest in the relationship between the natural, the artificial and mutated. Appropriately, in the context of YSP, Cybernetically Engineered Cloned and Grown Rabbit and Wilder Shores of Desire are sited in a man-made landscape that was conceived as a pleasure ground in the 18th century, overlooking an exotic vista of imported plants and trees.
Marc Quinn says: “I’m interested in nature but also the interaction between culture and nature, our mediated relationship to nature and what’s natural.”
Important works by Quinn include Self, a series of self-portraits begun in 1991 made from eight pints of the artist’s own blood drawn over a period of months, and Garden, 2000, comprising plants held in cryogenic suspension.
Quinn, along with Emin, is one of a number of leading artists known under the collective term Young British Artists (YBA). Launched by the Damien Hirst-organised exhibition Freeze in 1988 and coming to prominence in the 1990s, the YBAs were a group who gained notoriety through their anti-establishment and provocative works and the highly controversial exhibition from Charles Saatchi’s collection: Sensation at the Royal Academy in 1997.
The display in the Formal Garden continues YSP's commitment to sharing the best of sculpture practice. It forms part of an extensive open air exhibition programme that traces the evolution of sculpture from the modern period, with monumental bronzes by Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore; through the new generation of artists such as Anthony Caro, minimalism of Sol LeWitt, Land Art interventions by James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy and David Nash; to present day explorations of form, material and process.
Marc Quinn is one of the leading artists of his generation who came to prominence in 1991 with his sculpture Self (1991). Other critically acclaimed works include Alison Lapper Pregnant (2005), a fifteen-ton marble statue of Alison Lapper - a pregnant disabled woman - exhibited on the fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square in London, and Siren (2008) a solid gold sculpture of the model Kate Moss that was on display at The British Museum, London. He has shown internationally in museums and galleries including Tate Gallery, London (1995), Fondazione Prada, Milan (2000), Institut Océanographique, Monaco (2012), Fondazioni Georgio Cini (2013) and White Cube, Hong Kong (2013/14). Throughout his work, Quinn draws on ideas and themes relating to the human body. Other key subjects include cycles of growth and evolution through topical issues such as genetics and the manipulation of DNA, as well as issues of life and death and identity. Quinn’s work uses a broad range of materials, both traditional and untraditional. The materiality of the object, in both its elemental composition and surface appearance, is at the heart of Quinn’s work.
Marc Quinn, Cybernetically Engineered Cloned and Grown Rabbit, 2004. Courtesy Private Collection. Photo Jonty Wilde.