The British artist Marc Quinn, born in 1964, came to the attention of the international art scene in 1991 with Self, a cast of his own head realized in eight pints of his own frozen blood, exhibited in a specially designed refrigeration unit. Since 1999, he has been creating sculptures in classic white marble of subjects who lack one or more limbs; the best known is his 2005 Trafalgar Square installation, Alison Lapper Pregnant. In addressing the purely physical aspects of life, Quinn confronts the viewer with the gaping chasm between the physical and the mental, beauty and ugliness, the eternal and the mortal. His work has been presented and acquired by leading galleries and museums around the world and was recently the subject of an exhibition at Mary Boone Gallery in New York. This overview of recent developments also includes a history of his career and documentation of all major works.
