The first major solo museum presentation in Spain of British artist Marc Quinn at CAC Málaga will include a selection of new and recent works that continue Quinn’s investigation into some of the key concerns of our age. Violence and Serenity curated by Fernando Francés, focusing on such wide-ranging themes as notions of identity, mapping and our biological and cultural evolution, Quinn’s work incorporates a range of media including sculpture, painting, tapestry, photography and drawing. Marc Quinn lives and works in London. In collaboration with the British Council.

12 September to 30 November 2014

Quinn first came to international prominence in the 1990s when he produced some of the period’s most iconic works such as Self (1991), a sculptural self-portrait made using his own blood, and Incarnate (1996), which is included in this exhibition. Since then, an uncompromising use of materials and a conceptual rigour combine in works that address, head-on, our biological mortality, the diminishing state of the natural world and the overriding power of human desire.

photo marcquinn.com

For Fernando Francés, Director of the CAC Málaga: “The natural course of life and scientific advances intended to avoid destruction and death come face-to-face in Marc Quinn’s work and his oeuvre precisely reflects what reality prefers not to reveal. Military conflicts taking place around the world are notably present in his latest series (…) Beauty in death and violence, representations of bodies and living beings impossible to find in nature, displaying themselves to the human eye as they have never done before, portraits made from DNA: in sum, Marc Quinn’s work invites us to constantly challenge the principles and pillars of human knowledge. The viewer enters a laboratory in which science succumbs before art and death before eternal beauty”.

photo maryboonegallery.com

This exhibition will centre around a new body of work entitled The Toxic Sublime, distorted landscapes that blur the boundaries between painting and sculpture. In these works, Quinn begins with a contradictory process: a sublime image of a beautiful sunrise, applied to a sheet of aluminium, is submitted to a process of ‘toxic’ disintegration, alteration and decay through a layer of spray paint and repetitive sanding. As part of this lengthy process, Quinn adds in elements to his composition from the ‘real’ world of the street, such as chains or pothole covers, which are placed under the work during the sanding so that their ghostly outlines appear in the image. Moreover, holes, lines and striations in the surface of the work are amplified by a process of bending and folding the aluminium. The resulting paintings – although retaining the elements of a landscape or seascape, with their horizontal, tonal gradations – have the physical presence of sculpture, appearing more like discarded remnants from a physical disaster or simply gnarled detritus gathered from our immediate environment.

photo breakcolorart.files.wordpress.com