Marc Quinn

The Giorgio Cini Foundation is delighted to announce Marc Quinn, a major exhibition which opens on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore on 28 May 2013 in tandem with the inauguration of the 55th Venice Biennale of Visual Arts. Curated by Germano Celant, the solo show includes sculptures, paintings and other art objects by one of the original Young British Artists. Admission to the exhibition is free and it runs until 29 September 2013.

Consisting of more than 50 works, including the public debut of at least 13 new works, Marc Quinn will be one of the artist’s most important exhibitions to date. In addition to reuniting Quinn and Celant, who last worked together on the exhibition Garden at the Prada Foundation, (Milan, 2000) Marc Quinn marks a return of the artist to Venice, following his 2003 show at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, The Overwhelming World of Desire, and highlights the Giorgio Cini Foundation’s growing interest in contemporary art.

Marc Quinn began his career exploring issues such as the relation between art and science, the human body and its survival mechanisms, life and its preservation, and beauty and death. Slated to open to the public on 29 May 2013, Quinn describes the exhibition as “a journey from the origins of life” that celebrates through very powerful works “the awe and wonder of the world in which we live.”

The works on view will include a unique site-specific installation specially adapted for the island of San Giorgio titled Evolution (2005). This series of ten monumental flesh-pink marble sculptures represent foetuses at different stages of gestation. Placed in the water these sculptures conjure up the mystery of life as an extraterrestrial gift that emerges from the lagoon. In another homage to nature, seven colossal seashells in the series The Archaeology of Art seem to ask if art is an enigmatic, intrinsic part of nature. These perfectly symmetrical, naturally occurring forms belie a strange intelligence and seem to follow some order greater than themselves. Lastly, also on view is a new form of the artist’s monumental work, Alison Lapper Pregnant (2005), the original having been previously installed in September 2005 on the fourth plinth of London’s Trafalgar Square. Also a prominent feature in London’s Paralympic Games’ closing ceremony, the work celebrates the triumph of life force over adversity and suggests “a new model for female heroism” in which love, maternity and vitality take on an unexpected form and reach new heights.

Quinn’s conceptual practice incorporates sculpture, painting, installations and films. The artist’s preoccupation with the metamorphic ability of both human life and nature points to his fascination with our innate spirituality. Quinn questions the codes of nature through his use of uncompromising materials such as ice, blood, marble, glass and lead. Through the use of such materials, Quinn’s works are at once poetic and confrontational through their exploration of life, death, sexuality and religion. Quinn transforms the act of seeing by forcing us to question what is around us, propelling us into the unknown in order to rediscover.

Marc Quinn
curator: Germano Celant