Marc Quinn valuation
Cast his own head in nine pints of his own frozen blood, and put Alison Lapper on the fourth plinth.
Marc Quinn was born in London in 1964, read history and art history at Cambridge, and came to attention with the Young British Artists.
What a work by Marc Quinn is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
Marc Quinn was born in London in 1964, read history and art history at Cambridge, and came to attention with the Young British Artists. Self, first made in 1991, is a cast of his head in his own frozen blood, kept in a refrigerated case and remade every five years — a portrait that would collapse if the power failed. Alison Lapper Pregnant, a fifteen-tonne marble of a pregnant artist born without arms, occupied the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square from 2005. Other works include the frozen flower pieces, the gold Kate Moss sculptures and the painted iris canvases.
The materials are the point and they are also the difficulty: blood, ice, bread and living plants are works that require infrastructure rather than a wall, and a valuation has to account for what maintaining the piece involves. Most sculptures exist in small numbered editions, some in several materials and sizes, and the edition and material together identify the work. The bronzes and marbles behave conventionally; the refrigerated and organic works do not. Certificates and studio documentation are essential. There is also a substantial editioned print output.
At a glance
- Born
- 1964, London
- Movements
- Contemporary art, Young British Artists
Self, the Fourth Plinth and Breath
Quinn was the first artist taken on by Jay Jopling, who showed Self in 1991, and the work was seen by a much wider public in Sensation at the Royal Academy in 1997. The Fondation Beyeler showed all the versions of Self made between 1991 and 2006 in 2009. Alison Lapper Pregnant was the first commission for the Fourth Plinth, awarded in 2004, and for the opening of the London 2012 Paralympic Games he made Breath, a giant inflatable version of the same figure.
For an owner, the material and edition of a sculpture, and for a refrigerated or organic work the studio's care instructions, are part of what is being sold, and the certificate should state them.
Garden, the Sulston portrait and Siren
Quinn spent his early years in Paris, where his father was a physicist at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, and remembers being fascinated by the atomic clocks in the laboratory. Emotional Detox, seven lead sculptures cast from his own body after the seven deadly sins, was shown at Tate Britain in 1995. Garden, made for the Fondazione Prada in Milan in 2000, is twelve metres of real flowers frozen in silicone oil and belongs to the foundation, and his portrait of the geneticist John Sulston, of 2001, made of bacteria carrying Sulston's DNA, is in the National Portrait Gallery, which also owns the 2006 version of Self.
Sphinx, of 2006, shows Kate Moss in a yoga pose, and Siren, of 2008, is a life-size Moss in solid 18-carat gold that was shown at the British Museum. Germano Celant curated a show of more than fifty of his works at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini during the Venice Biennale of 2013, and Sir John Soane's Museum showed All About Love in 2017. In July 2020 his statue of the protester Jen Reid, A Surge of Power, was put up without permission in Bristol on the plinth left empty by the statue of Edward Colston.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
