Together with Damian Hirst, Tracey Emin and others, Marc Quinn belongs to the loose group of Young British Artists, whose work first became internationally known through the exhibition 'Sensation' of Charles Saatchi's Collection in 1997. Quinn's oeuvre is heterogeneous, encompassing sculptures, installations, and paintings and he uses material ranging from the traditional, such as bronze, glass and marble, to the unusual, such as lead, ice, bread, blood, and even DNA. But his theme is a constant: the beauty of life and simultaneously the reflection on it's transience.
The work that brought him the first public attention was 'Self' (1991), a frozen cast of the artist's head made from his own blood. In the year 2000, he created a key work, a frozen garden. In a large, refrigerated glass display case, he preserved exotic plants by freezing them in silicone oil: the perfect illusion of a garden lacking a decisive quality: the ability to grow. From this frozen garden, Quinn developed his famous flower paintings, combining flowers and fruit which do not grow together in nature, thus pointing out the intervention of science by genetic engineering and cloning.
As early 1995, Tate Gallery in London presented a solo exhibition of Mark Quinn's works. Further solo exhibitions followed at: Tate Liverpool (2002); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2004): Groninger Museum, Groningen and MACRO, Rome (2006), DHC/Art Foundation, Montreal (2007); Fondation Beyeler, Basel and British Museum, London (2009). Quinn was represented at the Venice Biennale in 2003.
