Wednesday, July 29, 2009

MARC QUINN SHOW SEPTEMBER 24 - JANUARY 23, 2010

The Goss-Michael Foundation is pleased to announce an exhibition of sculptural works by one of the most influential British contemporary artists: Marc Quinn.

The GMF has partnered with The Rachofsky Collection, one of the world’s foremost private collections, to produce an exceptional survey of Marc Quinn’s sculptural works throughout the last decade. Through the collaboration between these two prominent private collections, the GMF and the Rachofsky Collection hope to contribute to Dallas’ rise into the ranks of influential contemporary art capitals.

The GMF and the Rachofsky Collection bring together a strong array of Quinn’s works dated from 1998 to present. Utilizing both traditional mediums such as bronze and marble, in addition to more innovative materials such as ice, blood, insulin and DNA, Quinn breaks the boundaries of historical sculpture-making. The works included in the exhibition comment on the modern preoccupation of eternal preservation of the self and explore Quinn’s obsession with the unpredictability of the human body and the dualisms that define human life, such as: spiritual and physical, surface and depth, cerebral and sexual.

The Rachofsky Collection has contributed Marc Quinn’s signature piece, Self II (1998), which has become famously known as The Blood Head. This frozen sculpture of the artist’s head is made from ten pints of his own blood, taken from his body over a five month period. Juxtaposed in the space is the Goss-Michael Collection’s, Sky (2006), a frozen representation of Quinn’s child created from the birth placenta and umbilical cord.

Amongst several sculptural works in the exhibition is another of Quinn’s most important pieces: Alison Lapper and Parys (2009), a 7ft high marble sculpture of Quinn’s dear friend Alison Lapper. Born with no arms and shortened legs, she is powerfully depicted sitting with her son Parys. Again, Quinn challenges traditional parameters and social standards for immortalizing beauty in white marble, elevating instead on a tall plinth an unconventional sitter. A version of this sculpture was on prominent display on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in front of the National Gallery (London, 2005).

The show will run from September 24 - January 23, 2010

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