Marc Quinn

Marc Quinn (British, b. 1964) is a contemporary artist whose practice is connected to Identity / Material Sculpture. The work focuses primarily on prints & editions.

Born in 1964 in London, Quinn spent his early years in Paris before moving back to the UK to study History of Art at Cambridge University. In the 1990s, he was represented by Jay Jopling and exhibited his iconic series Self (1991), a self-portrait made of the artist’s own frozen blood. In the early 90s, Quinn was a member of the loosely affiliated Young British Artists group supported by the art collector Charles Saatchi, alongside Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread, Tracey Emin and others, who gained considerable attention after their Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy in London in 1997. The exhibition, which featured Quinn’s famous Self sculpture, later toured to the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin and the Brooklyn Museum in New York.

A series of exhibitions of Quinn’s works followed, including the South London Gallery (1999), The Groningen Museum (2000) and the Fondazione Prada in Milan (2000), where he exhibited his notable work Garden, containing thousands of flowers frozen in silicone oil.