Marc Quinn was born in London in 1964. He began his artistic career as one of the Young British Artists, exhibiting work at the White Cube Gallery alongside Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, Rachel Whiteread, Sam Taylor-Wood, and Gilbert & George. His work encompasses installations, sculptures and paintings, and addresses subjects including the media, the body, the environment, and identity.
Marc Quinn has said that through his art he explores ‘what it is to be human in the world today’. A wide variety of materials is evident in his works, including bread, marble, flowers, and steel. His ongoing work ‘Self’ is a series of self-portraits made of his own blood. It appeared at London’s Royal Academy as part of the Sensation exhibition. He has held solo exhibitions in London’s National Portrait Gallery, the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, and Milan’s Fondazione Prada. His notorious sculpture Alison Lapper Pregnant brought a large amount of media attention when it was exhibited on Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth. In 1999 he began to make marble sculptures of amputees. A 2015 exhibition called The Toxic Sublime explored humanity’s impact on nature through three-dimensional seascapes, new sculptures, and paintings. His work has reached an international audience, and is held in museums in Oslo, Paris, Lisbon, Amsterdam, and New York.
Marc Quinn has produced many prints, his first prints being created in the 1980s. Many of Marc Quinn’s prints are pigment prints though he also produces archival pigment prints, woodcut prints and embossed chine-collé prints. All of Marc Quinn prints are original prints as Quinn saw printmaking as a distinct medium to create artworks.
