Artist:
Marc Quinn
Title:
Sphinx, Myth, Siren
Year:
2005
Adress:
Hotel Clarion, Oslo (temporary)
Website:
Hypermobility an ideal?
This woman meets with the ideal: long legs, long hair, a symmetrical face. However, this is not the first thing you see.
Unconsciously, in the blink of an eye, I’m looking to her eyes, her hair, her pelvis, her legs. In a few mini-seconds I come to the conclusion that this is a special person, a snake-human.
Kate Moss is shown hyper-realistic; we can see details like the bra on her skin. Because of this hyperrealism, the hypermobilism is more compelling and also more alienating.
This human is not our ideal. A snake-human is shown in the closed atmosphere of the circus. It is intended to scare you, to laugh, to shudder.
This is not what an artwork in the public space usually does; they show our examples, our ideals.
Marc Quinn depicts with Kate Moss a snake-man to be realistic, it might even be an example.
By Theo, www.artatsite.com
Vertaling
Hypermobiliteit een ideaal?
Deze vrouw voldoet geheel aan het ideaalbeeld: heeft lange benen, lange haren, een symmetrisch gezicht. Maar dit is niet het eerste dat je ziet.
In een oogwenk en onbewust gaan mijn ogen vanuit haar ogen, naar haar haren, naar haar edele delen, naar haar benen. Dan kom ik binnen enkele miniseconden tot de conclusie dat dit een bijzonder mens, een slangenmens is.
Kate Moss is hyperrealistisch afgebeeld: je ziet de details van haar topje op haar huid. Door de hyperrealisme wordt de hypermobiliteit des te meer overtuigend en ook vervreemdend.
Dit mens is niet ideaal. Een slangenmens zie je in de beslotenheid van een circus. Dit is bedoeld om te schrikken, om te lachen, om te huiveren.
Dit is niet hetgeen een kunstwerk in de openbare ruimte meestal doet; deze zijn vaak ons voorbeeld of ons ideaal.
Marc Quinn toont ons met Kate Moss dat een slangenmens realistisch is, misschien zelfs een voorbeeld kan zijn.
Door Theo, www.artatsite.com
www.tomosha.com:
At the entrance of the exhibition "Guess what? Hardcore Contemporary Art’s Truly a World Treasure: Selected Works from the YAGEO Foundation Collection". Marc Quinn "Mith (sphinx)", 2006.
Famous Taiwan company Yageo Corporation was founded by Mr.Pierre Tie Min Chen. He is known as one of the most powerful art collectors in the world. Now his selected works are displayed at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. His collection consist of the works by great modern Chinese painters like Sanyu and Western contemporary works by Gerhard Richter.
www.marcquinn.com
Made immediately after The Complete Marbles - sculptures of people with disabilities, culminating with Alison Lapper Pregnant (2005) in Trafalgar Square - these sculptures deal with the opposite - the idealised unreal image of the idolised body. These works all depict the fashion model Kate Moss who became a media icon for our age.
Presented in contorted yoga poses, the works explore the idea of Moss as an abstraction, an idealised figure who is more of a cultural hallucination than an actual person of flesh and blood. The culmination of this series is Siren (2008), a cast of Quinn’s sculpture Sphinx (2005), in solid 18 carat gold.
Quinn says of the works, "Human beings often create images, begin to worship them and then forget the images were initially invented by them. They are left with an abstract image that is impossible to measure up to. This is the basis of all celebrity and religious imagery.
Gold is a metal that humans have decided is one of the most valuable materials in the world, but like their invented images of perfection, gold itself is a belief system - inherently no more valuable than any other metal. By casting Sphinx in gold, Siren creates an image of all the impossible dreams that lure people to wreck their lives on the rocky shore of reality - the ultimate hallucination which drives humans to madness."
When this sculpture was shown in the British Museum in 2008 alongside its classical antecedents, it also coincided with the beginning of the global financial crisis, thus further emphasising the fragility of all these belief systems. In The Road to Enlightenment, Moss is depicted as an emaciated figure. This work is based on a Buddhist sculpture that is approximately 2,000 years old, which relates to a moment of enlightenment and the birth of Buddhist philosophy. The work also makes reference to eating disorders which can arise from the pursuit of impossible perfection; and remind us that we can become controlled by the images and fantasies that we collectively create.
www.wikipedia.org:
In 2006, Sphinx, a sculpture of the British fashion model Kate Moss in a complicated yoga position was unveiled by the British sculptor Marc Quinn. The life-size sculpture is made of cast bronze, with a white-painted finish, and shows Moss wearing a leotard with her feet and hands behind her head.
The pose itself was modelled by a more experienced woman yoga practitioner, though the body, hands, and feet are based on Moss' exact measurements and earlier lifecastings.[citation needed] Quinn's representation of Moss is meant to show "a mirror of ourselves, a knotted Venus of our age."
www.theguardian.com:
Marc Quinn's last sculpture transformed Alison Lapper - a woman lacking arms and fully developed legs - into a dramatic, powerful figure for Trafalgar Square. His new work, Sphinx, takes a woman of unearthly beauty and transforms her into a contorted figure with her ankles uncomfortably wrapped round her ears.
"The two sculptures are really about the same thing: why we do, or do not, find a person beautiful," he said.
Quinn was drawn to Moss because of her ambiguous place in our culture: a creature who is admired and observed obsessively, but about whom we have little real knowledge.
"She is a contemporary version of the Sphinx. A mystery. There must be something about her that has clicked with the collective unconscious to make her so ubiquitous, so spirit of the age," Quinn said. "When people look back at this time she'll be the archetypal image, just as Louise Brooks was in the 1920s. For me as an artist it's interesting to make something about the time I live in."
This is not a personal portrait of Moss; the work makes no attempt to convey her inner life. "It's a portrait of an image, and the way that image is sculpted and twisted by our collective desire," Quinn said. "She is a mirror of ourselves, a knotted Venus of our age."
Since 2006, Marc Quinn has made numerous studies of the supermodel Kate Moss. In April 2006, Sphinx, a sculpture of Kate Moss by Quinn, was revealed.[38] The sculpture shows Moss in a yoga position with her ankles and arms wrapped behind her ears. This body of work culminated in an exhibition at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York in May 2007. The sculpture is on permanent display in Folketeatret in Oslo, Norway.
In August 2008, Quinn unveiled another sculpture of Moss in solid 18-carat gold called Siren, which was exhibited at the British Museum in London. The life-size sculpture was promoted as "the largest gold statue since ancient Egypt".
www.wikipedia.org:
Marc Quinn (born 8 January 1964) is a British contemporary visual artist whose work includes sculpture, installation and painting. Quinn explores 'what it is to be human in the world today' through subjects including the body, genetics, identity, environment and the media.
Quinn's early work was concerned with issues of corporeality, decay and preservation. He experimented with organic and degradable materials including bread, blood, lead, flowers and DNA producing sculpture and installation, including Bread Sculptures (1988), Self (1991), Emotional Detox (1995), Garden (2000), and DNA Portrait of John Sulston (2001). In the 2000s, he began to focus on the use of marble, bronze and concrete. The artist explored the body and its extremes through the lens of classical and urban materials; works included The Complete Marbles (1999 - 2005), Alison Lapper Pregnant (2004), Evolution (2005 - 2009) and Planet (2008). Since 2010 he has worked with metals including stainless steel, aluminium, graffiti paints, seaside detritus, tapestry and painting, as seen in The History Paintings (2009–present) and The Toxic Sublime (2014–present).
Alison Lapper, The Fourth Plinth (2005–2007)
Quinn has made a series of marble sculptures of people either born with limbs missing or who have had them amputated. This culminated in his 15-ton marble statue of Alison Lapper, a fellow artist born with no arms and severely shortened legs, which was displayed on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, London from September 2005 until October 2007. (The Fourth Plinth is used for rotating displays of sculpture.) In Disability Studies Quarterly, Ann Millett writes, "The work has been highly criticized for capitalizing on the shock value of disability, as well as lauded for its progressive social values. Alison Lapper Pregnant and the controversy surrounding it showcase disability issues at the forefront of current debates in contemporary art".
A large reproduction of the sculpture was used as a central element of the 2012 Summer Paralympics opening ceremony.
Siren (2008), Myth, Sphinx
Since 2006, Marc Quinn has made numerous studies of the supermodel Kate Moss. In April 2006, Sphinx, a sculpture of Kate Moss by Quinn, was revealed. The sculpture shows Moss in a yoga position with her ankles and arms wrapped behind her ears. This body of work culminated in an exhibition at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York in May 2007. The sculpture is on permanent display in Folketeatret in Oslo, Norway.
In August 2008, Quinn unveiled another sculpture of Moss in solid 18-carat gold called Siren, which was exhibited at the British Museum in London. The life-size sculpture was promoted as "the largest gold statue since ancient Egypt".
This woman meets with the ideal: long legs, long hair, a symmetrical face. However, this is not the first thing you see.
Unconsciously, in the blink of an eye, I’m looking to her eyes, her hair, her pelvis, her legs. In a few mini-seconds I come to the conclusion that this is a special person, a snake-human.
Kate Moss is shown hyper-realistic; we can see details like the bra on her skin. Because of this hyperrealism, the hypermobilism is more compelling and also more alienating.
This human is not our ideal. A snake-human is shown in the closed atmosphere of the circus. It is intended to scare you, to laugh, to shudder.
This is not what an artwork in the public space usually does; they show our examples, our ideals.
Marc Quinn depicts with Kate Moss a snake-man to be realistic, it might even be an example.
By Theo, www.artatsite.com
Vertaling
Hypermobiliteit een ideaal?
Deze vrouw voldoet geheel aan het ideaalbeeld: heeft lange benen, lange haren, een symmetrisch gezicht. Maar dit is niet het eerste dat je ziet.
In een oogwenk en onbewust gaan mijn ogen vanuit haar ogen, naar haar haren, naar haar edele delen, naar haar benen. Dan kom ik binnen enkele miniseconden tot de conclusie dat dit een bijzonder mens, een slangenmens is.
Kate Moss is hyperrealistisch afgebeeld: je ziet de details van haar topje op haar huid. Door de hyperrealisme wordt de hypermobiliteit des te meer overtuigend en ook vervreemdend.
Dit mens is niet ideaal. Een slangenmens zie je in de beslotenheid van een circus. Dit is bedoeld om te schrikken, om te lachen, om te huiveren.
Dit is niet hetgeen een kunstwerk in de openbare ruimte meestal doet; deze zijn vaak ons voorbeeld of ons ideaal.
Marc Quinn toont ons met Kate Moss dat een slangenmens realistisch is, misschien zelfs een voorbeeld kan zijn.
Door Theo, www.artatsite.com
www.tomosha.com:
At the entrance of the exhibition "Guess what? Hardcore Contemporary Art’s Truly a World Treasure: Selected Works from the YAGEO Foundation Collection". Marc Quinn "Mith (sphinx)", 2006.
Famous Taiwan company Yageo Corporation was founded by Mr.Pierre Tie Min Chen. He is known as one of the most powerful art collectors in the world. Now his selected works are displayed at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. His collection consist of the works by great modern Chinese painters like Sanyu and Western contemporary works by Gerhard Richter.
www.marcquinn.com
Made immediately after The Complete Marbles - sculptures of people with disabilities, culminating with Alison Lapper Pregnant (2005) in Trafalgar Square - these sculptures deal with the opposite - the idealised unreal image of the idolised body. These works all depict the fashion model Kate Moss who became a media icon for our age.
Presented in contorted yoga poses, the works explore the idea of Moss as an abstraction, an idealised figure who is more of a cultural hallucination than an actual person of flesh and blood. The culmination of this series is Siren (2008), a cast of Quinn’s sculpture Sphinx (2005), in solid 18 carat gold.
Quinn says of the works, "Human beings often create images, begin to worship them and then forget the images were initially invented by them. They are left with an abstract image that is impossible to measure up to. This is the basis of all celebrity and religious imagery.
Gold is a metal that humans have decided is one of the most valuable materials in the world, but like their invented images of perfection, gold itself is a belief system - inherently no more valuable than any other metal. By casting Sphinx in gold, Siren creates an image of all the impossible dreams that lure people to wreck their lives on the rocky shore of reality - the ultimate hallucination which drives humans to madness."
When this sculpture was shown in the British Museum in 2008 alongside its classical antecedents, it also coincided with the beginning of the global financial crisis, thus further emphasising the fragility of all these belief systems. In The Road to Enlightenment, Moss is depicted as an emaciated figure. This work is based on a Buddhist sculpture that is approximately 2,000 years old, which relates to a moment of enlightenment and the birth of Buddhist philosophy. The work also makes reference to eating disorders which can arise from the pursuit of impossible perfection; and remind us that we can become controlled by the images and fantasies that we collectively create.
www.wikipedia.org:
In 2006, Sphinx, a sculpture of the British fashion model Kate Moss in a complicated yoga position was unveiled by the British sculptor Marc Quinn. The life-size sculpture is made of cast bronze, with a white-painted finish, and shows Moss wearing a leotard with her feet and hands behind her head.
The pose itself was modelled by a more experienced woman yoga practitioner, though the body, hands, and feet are based on Moss' exact measurements and earlier lifecastings.[citation needed] Quinn's representation of Moss is meant to show "a mirror of ourselves, a knotted Venus of our age."
www.theguardian.com:
Marc Quinn's last sculpture transformed Alison Lapper - a woman lacking arms and fully developed legs - into a dramatic, powerful figure for Trafalgar Square. His new work, Sphinx, takes a woman of unearthly beauty and transforms her into a contorted figure with her ankles uncomfortably wrapped round her ears.
"The two sculptures are really about the same thing: why we do, or do not, find a person beautiful," he said.
Quinn was drawn to Moss because of her ambiguous place in our culture: a creature who is admired and observed obsessively, but about whom we have little real knowledge.
"She is a contemporary version of the Sphinx. A mystery. There must be something about her that has clicked with the collective unconscious to make her so ubiquitous, so spirit of the age," Quinn said. "When people look back at this time she'll be the archetypal image, just as Louise Brooks was in the 1920s. For me as an artist it's interesting to make something about the time I live in."
This is not a personal portrait of Moss; the work makes no attempt to convey her inner life. "It's a portrait of an image, and the way that image is sculpted and twisted by our collective desire," Quinn said. "She is a mirror of ourselves, a knotted Venus of our age."
Since 2006, Marc Quinn has made numerous studies of the supermodel Kate Moss. In April 2006, Sphinx, a sculpture of Kate Moss by Quinn, was revealed.[38] The sculpture shows Moss in a yoga position with her ankles and arms wrapped behind her ears. This body of work culminated in an exhibition at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York in May 2007. The sculpture is on permanent display in Folketeatret in Oslo, Norway.
In August 2008, Quinn unveiled another sculpture of Moss in solid 18-carat gold called Siren, which was exhibited at the British Museum in London. The life-size sculpture was promoted as "the largest gold statue since ancient Egypt".
www.wikipedia.org:
Marc Quinn (born 8 January 1964) is a British contemporary visual artist whose work includes sculpture, installation and painting. Quinn explores 'what it is to be human in the world today' through subjects including the body, genetics, identity, environment and the media.
Quinn's early work was concerned with issues of corporeality, decay and preservation. He experimented with organic and degradable materials including bread, blood, lead, flowers and DNA producing sculpture and installation, including Bread Sculptures (1988), Self (1991), Emotional Detox (1995), Garden (2000), and DNA Portrait of John Sulston (2001). In the 2000s, he began to focus on the use of marble, bronze and concrete. The artist explored the body and its extremes through the lens of classical and urban materials; works included The Complete Marbles (1999 - 2005), Alison Lapper Pregnant (2004), Evolution (2005 - 2009) and Planet (2008). Since 2010 he has worked with metals including stainless steel, aluminium, graffiti paints, seaside detritus, tapestry and painting, as seen in The History Paintings (2009–present) and The Toxic Sublime (2014–present).
Alison Lapper, The Fourth Plinth (2005–2007)
Quinn has made a series of marble sculptures of people either born with limbs missing or who have had them amputated. This culminated in his 15-ton marble statue of Alison Lapper, a fellow artist born with no arms and severely shortened legs, which was displayed on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, London from September 2005 until October 2007. (The Fourth Plinth is used for rotating displays of sculpture.) In Disability Studies Quarterly, Ann Millett writes, "The work has been highly criticized for capitalizing on the shock value of disability, as well as lauded for its progressive social values. Alison Lapper Pregnant and the controversy surrounding it showcase disability issues at the forefront of current debates in contemporary art".
A large reproduction of the sculpture was used as a central element of the 2012 Summer Paralympics opening ceremony.
Siren (2008), Myth, Sphinx
Since 2006, Marc Quinn has made numerous studies of the supermodel Kate Moss. In April 2006, Sphinx, a sculpture of Kate Moss by Quinn, was revealed. The sculpture shows Moss in a yoga position with her ankles and arms wrapped behind her ears. This body of work culminated in an exhibition at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York in May 2007. The sculpture is on permanent display in Folketeatret in Oslo, Norway.
In August 2008, Quinn unveiled another sculpture of Moss in solid 18-carat gold called Siren, which was exhibited at the British Museum in London. The life-size sculpture was promoted as "the largest gold statue since ancient Egypt".