Marc Quinn - Chemical Life Support
January 21 - March 26
In Chemical Life Support Marc Quinn discusses the constructed concept normality, which daily forms our experience of the other and of the self. He raises questions concerning what we mean with the concept of health and physical perfection. About the difference between what we consider to be a reality and that we think we see and experience, not least in regard to our own and other's bodies.
The body has often been a theme for Marc Quinn, where he has particularly interested himself with the body's mutability and various stages of life and death, thought and consciousness.
The artist has made use of various materials, from bronze and marble to blood, glass, dough and ice, and charged his work with a discussion about the subject, by working on the basis of his own body, in for example works such as Self (1996), Incarnate (1996),and Bread Hands (1998). Chemical Life Support exhibits a number of sculpted bodies in natural size of existing people, all bearers of a chronic and/ or fatal illness.
Through treatment with medicines they have been given the possibility to live a relatively "normal" life. The artist has mixed the sculptures material, polymer-wax, with the respective life-supporting medicine.
Marc Quinn has depicted his own son, Lucas, suffering from milk allergy, with the addition of the lactos-free drink which the boy recieves as a substitute. Carl Whittaker, who survived a heart transplant, has been depicted with the addition of the blend of medicines which hinder his body from rejecting the donated organ. Silvia Petretti is an HIV-positive woman sculpted with a complement of her preventive medicine. Nicholas Grogan is a diabetic and the scupture includes the addition of insulin. Kate Hodgkison has her chemical support in medicine against Lupus disease.
In the exhibition's two busts, Anna Cannings (Blind from Birth) and Bill Waltier (Blind from Birth) 2005, depicting persons born blind, the empty,blank eyes without iris relate to ancient sculptures in which the original colouration which depicted the eye has disappeared, but in its present blank condition has come to be synonymous with seeing.
Marc Quinn was born in 1964, studied at Cambridge and lives in London. Marc Quinn has had solo exhibitions at Tate Gallery, London (1995). Kunstverein Hannover (1999), Fondazione Prada, Milano (2000) and The Irish Museum of Modern Art,Dublin (2004). Chemical Life Support is Marc Quinn's first solo exhibition in Scandinavia.