Marc Quinn was born in London in 1964.

His work exploits a variety of techniques and media to reflect on the nature of humanity, life and death. Artista gained notoriety in the early 90s through his work Self, a sculpture of his head made from 4.5 litres of his own frozen blood. The theme of preservation, the conservation of living forms in order to isolate them from the ravages of time, has been a constant throughout his works, the most recent of which, Sky, portrays the head of Artista's son made using the baby's placenta and umbilical cord. Quinn also works with 'traditional' techniques, using paintings - his large floral compositions are well-known - as well as prints and photography, always striving to understand and describe the process of life. In Italy he had a solo exhibition at Fondazione Prada in 2000, and is currently exhibiting in a solo show in Rome at the Macro Museo d�fArte Contemporanea, curated by Danilo Eccher and Achille Bonito Oliva.

The flowers in Quinn's garden epitomize this dimension of the symbolic. Not only because a rose or a lily conveys the iconographic meaning of modesty or the purity of the Virgin, but also because it is impossible for a flower not to mean something: it is impossible to deprive flowers of their symbolic expression.

Germano Celant, Marc Quinn: sulla via dell'Eden (On the road to Eden), in Marc Quinn, Milano, Fondazione Prada, 2000, p. 18.

Nature and anti-nature vie in the work of Marc Quinn to broker a truce between the catastrophic effects of time and our desire for things to last. Art appears to be mobilized on behalf of a dream of omnipotence rendering our present eternal, happily jettisoning any hope of a future in the here-and-now of a work whose contemplation detains the viewer on the blissful threshold of an everlasting present.

Achille Bonito Oliva, L'arte e` la morte al lavoro (Art is death at work), in Marc Quinn, Milano, Electa/Macro, 2006, p. 28.

Marc Quinn chooses to focus his gaze on a point where the image has not yet been defined, where a thousand variations are still possible, in the uncertainty of a reality as yet unborn. Over and above a mere formal exploration, Marc Quinn's art demonstrates first of all the courage of an investigation which will not be limited merely to its subject but which concentrates on the process itself of the definition of that subject.

Danilo Eccher, Marc Quinn: come nella terra di nessuno (As in no-man's land), in Marc Quinn, Milano, Electa/Macro, 2006, p. 78.

Blood frozen and made solid, medicines mingled with polymer wax, wasting conditions mesmerized for eternity... Marc Quinn's art is a perfect balance between living flesh and iconographic qualities, between organic density and its power as imagery. The act of creation is transformed into a process which arrests organic degeneration, recreating the figurative beauty of a contemporary ecstasy. It is a devious beauty, disfigured, wounded; endowed by Quinn with the gracefulness of Pontormo's draperies or the fleshly radiance of a Guido Reni. Disease and physical decay enter into communion with figurative tension, so that the image of what is true fuses with the vehement grace of a cathartic gaze.

Gianluca Marziani, 2006.