Marc Quinn is perhaps most famous for a series of figurative sculptural works produced over the last 2 decades. Most noticeably ‘Blood Head’, a sculpture of his own head cast in 8 pints of his own frozen blood; ‘Sphinx’, a sculpture of Kate Moss depicted in a yoga position with her legs twisted around the back of her head and ‘Alison Lapper Pregnant’, a 3.6-metre sculpture of the disabled British artist which was put on Trafalgar Square's Fourth Plinth.
Quinn’s sculpture, paintings and drawings often deal with the distanced relationship we have with our bodies, highlighting how the conflict between the ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ has a grip on the contemporary psyche.
This recent study of flowers is a progression of a subject he began in 2000 when Quinn created ‘Garden’, a walk-through installation of impossibly beautiful flowers that will never decay. He followed with the ‘Eternal Spring’ sculptures - flowers preserved in perfect bloom by being plunged into sub-zero silicone.
‘At the Far Edges of the Universe’ and the two other new editions from Quinn: ‘Lavinia Plantia’ and ‘Sea of Tranquillity’ were images originally produced for his White Cube exhibition in 2010 and initially based on blooms such as orchids and tulips bought at Covent Garden Flower Market.
The editions, available individually or a set, are composed of 10 prints. Each one printed with pigmented inks on 308 gsm Hahnemühle Photo Rag cotton white paper and hand-varnished. Each individual print is signed by the artist and numbered on the reverse from an edition of 59.
Quinn’s flower paintings hit the headlines earlier this year when fashion label Wunderkind was accused of reproducing his striking floral pictures after dresses apparently bearing the prints appeared on the Paris catwalk.Quinn has since demanded they stop using the designs in their collections and stated: "To take someone's copyrighted material and turn it into a commercial product without permission is unacceptable."
‘At the Far Edges of the Universe’, ‘Lavinia Plantia’ and ‘Sea of Tranquillity’ are now currently available.
