Beschreibung:

Marc Quinn The Antarctic Nurseries of El Dorado (True North) 2011 painted bronze 103 x 65 x 30 cm. (40 1/2 x 25 5/8 x 11 3/4 in.) This work is unique.
Provenance Acquired directly from the artist Catalogue Essay “It’s like a transgenic plant; real flowers cast into bronze then reassembled by me to make an impossible plant. I developed a process to cast the actual fower. It was deemed impossible before I got it to work.” MARC QUINN The Antarctic Nurseries of El Dorado (True North), executed in 2011, is a prime example of Marc Quinn’s vast oeuvre, mainly concerned with exploring matters of idealistic beauty through an investigation of our distanced relationship of our bodies with nature. With works that are often considered controversial, the British artist has assumed a distinct interest in using flowers as his subject since 2000, incorporating the floral theme in a vast array of media, including sculpture, painting and drawing. In the present lot, one can see Quinn investigating the concept of ideal beauty, the flowers of which have been naturally and genetically modified to question notions of female sexuality: ‘Orchids are like perfectly evolved little sculptures in themselves, they’re full of colour, interesting shapes and beauty. Even though they are a plant’s reproductive organs, they pun on human ones too. They make you realise it is colour, life and sexuality that keeps the world turning. They are a celebration of life. I like all kinds of flowers…but none are quite as good as orchids.” (M. Quinn, quoted in ‘Marc Quinn on Orchids’, AnOther Magazine, 14 November 2011) The present lot exhibits Quinn’s quintessential technique: “You get a living flower, lower it into a tank of frozen silicone where it immediately Freezes solid and dies but keeps its fresh, living appearance. So from a living flower you suddenly have a sculpture of a flower made from the same atoms as the living flower but now somehow reconfigured to bean image of that flower. In a sense it is a deconstruction of the creation of any work of art from a living model.” (M. Quinn, and Danilo Eccher. Marc Quinn Myth. Milano: Charta, 2009, p. 73). Though cast in heavy bronze, The Antarctic Nurseries of El Dorado (True North) has been painted in white, discerning an ethereal quality that emits a delicate and fresh ethos. The present lot is reminiscent of porcelain, discerning a brittle eminence that resonates with the soft vulnerability of real petals. The flowers represent a real continuum, bearing fruit from its floral loins and further facilitating the illusions of incarnate existence through sexual connotations. The Antarctic Nurseries of El Dorado (True North) is an excellently refined example of Quinn’s flower series, where the artist explores the fake and plastic-coated reality, as well as the transience of life, through a partly natural, yet artificially contrived sculpture: “Casting each flower and part separately, I was then able to put together totally realistic, unreal plants. This also links back to my interest in DNA and genetic manipulation. In the case of these painted sculptures, the colour is what I would call shifting. It is disembodied from specific parts of the plants and lies on the surface like a sort of ectoplasm. It is disembodied from specific parts of the plants and lies on the surface like a sort of ectoplasm. It is almost as if we were witnessing the moment of transformation of something moving from the real into the realm of art”, (ibid). Read More