Marc Quinn, one of Britain's most prominent contemporary artists, is frequently described as an artist activist who uses his creative medium to spark social change. However, the renowned sculptor, who has created radical works addressing the pandemic, refugee crises, racism, and disability, firmly rejects the notion that his art serves as a vehicle for the world's biggest issues. Instead of focusing on divisive subjects or making pointed political statements, Quinn is more interested in exploring what unites humanity as a shared experience.
"Art is about being a person in the world and how that's a shared experience we all have," Quinn explains. "Sometimes I find, for some reason or another, that I want to make art about things that are part of the political spectrum, but it isn't an intention. Everything I do is about existing in this world, it's not pushing an agenda." In a world saturated with hot takes and opinion pieces, Quinn positions himself as what he considers the most important type of creative voice: "a chronicler."
While Quinn rejects the idea that his work is political, it is undeniably bold and groundbreaking. In 1991, at age 27, he created "Self," a frozen cast of his head made using 10 pints of his own blood, extracted over the course of a year. The revolutionary piece was designed to present a cumulative index of passing time and serve as an ongoing self-portrait documenting his aging and changing self. "Blood is like a liquid life," Quinn says. "I wanted to make a self-portrait that was more real. So many self-portraits are made of marble or bronze, which is annoying to me because there's a whole element missing. You've got the appearance of someone, but you haven't got any materiality that's linked to being human at all."
The creation process for "Self" became art legend. Quinn found a doctor who agreed to extract enough blood over five separate sessions. He then cast his head in plaster, which was filled with the extracted blood. The cast was frozen and placed in subzero silicone oil inside a Perspex box. Quinn creates a new version every five years, each time undergoing the same committed process. Seven versions now exist, and he is currently working on an exhibition that will showcase them all together. "What's interesting now, because of the development of bioscience and our ability to read DNA, is that they document my history and that of every relative of mine from the beginning of time," he explains. "It's the ultimate biological biography."
"Self" transformed Quinn into an art sensation and established him as one of the original Young British Artists (YBAs), a influential group that emerged in London in the 1980s alongside Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, and Damien Hirst. Quinn describes how multiple factors, including the combination of innovative artists and Charles Saatchi's famous 1992 show from which the YBA term originated, created a perfect storm for British art. "It was a great moment for British art," he reflects. "Plus, there was a recession, so people wanted to buy art that was $3,000 and not $300,000. People wanted art that was connected to the real world, which is what probably connects most of the YBAs. I think that's what people still want. Before then, art was abstract and elitist."
Using art as a way of reflecting the world we live in remains the central thread running through Quinn's diverse body of work. His installation "Garden," a full botanical garden frozen and displayed at the Fondazione Prada, explores humanity's manipulation of nature. "Our Blood," an ambitious public artwork comprising two enormous, identical cubes of frozen human blood made from donations by 5,000 resettled refugee volunteers and 5,000 non-refugee volunteers, speaks to the common bonds that unite all people regardless of origin.
Quinn's "Alison Lapper Pregnant," a marble sculpture of the pregnant disabled artist that was installed on Trafalgar Square's Fourth Plinth, serves as a meditation on who society chooses to celebrate and immortalize. "A Surge of Power" in 2020, a sculpture of a Black Lives Matter protester that was temporarily placed on top of Edward Colston's empty plinth in Bristol, makes a powerful statement about racial injustice and inequality. While Quinn never runs out of creative ideas, he admits that some concepts get left by the wayside. "There's no point in flogging a dead horse," he acknowledges.
Quinn's art has achieved significant commercial success, with high-profile collectors including Miuccia Prada and Tom Ford acquiring his works. In 2015, his bronze statue of Kate Moss in a yoga pose reached $1.3 million including fees at auction. Part of his broad appeal lies in his ability to both shock and challenge viewers while offering an original interpretation of the world around him. However, Quinn believes that provocation isn't always necessary in art. "I don't think all art has to shock," he states. "Things can be beautiful as well. The world changes. Sometimes culture brings forth shocking things, and sometimes it brings forth beautiful things, and often it's in a reverse reflection of what's happening in the world. When there's nothing happening, people crave something to disrupt their lives, and then when there's too much horror, people want something to calm them."
Regarding the pandemic's impact on art and society, Quinn notes how only recently, five years after the first lockdown, has COVID-19 started entering dinner conversations again. "I did some paintings about it, screens that were shown at Venice Biennale in 2021, but for most people it was much too early. They couldn't look at them at all, and I understand – it was a huge, worldwide, traumatic experience, but it's the artist's job to react in the moment."
Nature has emerged as an ongoing theme in Quinn's recent work, leading to a collaboration with Kew Gardens last year called "Light Into Life" – 20 new pieces that explore humanity's relationship with the natural world. One of the large mirrored sculptures, a towering orchid, now stands in the entrance of the private members club Annabels as part of its month-long Amazon campaign, which aims to raise funds for The Caring Family Foundation's reforestation and restoration efforts. "It becomes the environment that it's in, because it reflects it entirely," Quinn explains. "These sculptures dissolve into the setting, but you see yourself in it too and it makes you realize that you're also part of the environment. There's a more profound connection to understanding something if you experience it."
The Kew Gardens project appealed to the academic, studious aspect of Quinn's personality – the part that studied History of Art at Cambridge University. For the collaboration, he read numerous nature books and spoke with dozens of horticulturists. Some of the final sculptures were based on pressed plants he discovered in the Kew archives. "Part of getting into a subject is reading a lot around it, doing research and getting deeply into a topic," he explains. "I just love that aspect of the process, which the artworks pop out of."
While Quinn's work is displayed in some of the world's leading galleries, he remains passionate about the importance of public art in making the art industry more inclusive and less elitist. "I do a lot of stuff in the public realm because I like to connect with real people, which I define as those not in the art world," he explains. "Non-art world views of art are underestimated; people think they don't understand things, but actually, everyone understands things. They just aren't asked about it. Maybe they don't go to galleries, but a public artwork forces you to engage with a subject. Look at Alison Lapper. Trafalgar Square is full of statues of dead white guys who conquered the world, and then, in the middle of it, you had this amazing living, pregnant woman who looks very different to the people we choose to immortalize and celebrate."
Quinn believes that the invention of the internet and social media has created more opportunities for aspiring artists. The globalization of art means that creatives are better connected than he was when he first began his career in the 1990s. "There's good and bad to everything, but for it to be more international is good," he says. "Most of the things I do are abroad, and most of the collectors are abroad. We can do that much more now because we're connected online. We can communicate through social media and websites, and see shows happening all over the world. It's possible to discover artists from different places really quickly. Everything's sped up."
This digital transformation has opened up entirely new artistic territories to explore. "It's very interesting to be able to make art about a disembodied online world that mirrors the embodied world. It's completely new," Quinn observes. Forward-facing and brimming with ideas, Marc Quinn continues to chronicle the human experience through his evolving artistic practice. The Annabels for the Amazon campaign launched this September in partnership with The Caring Family Foundation as a month-long initiative dedicated to raising vital funds to support the foundation's reforestation and restoration efforts in the Brazilian Amazon, empower Indigenous communities, and continue its work with women and children in both Brazil and the UK.
