The Yale Center for British Art is showcasing six works by Marc Quinn — a British artist known for his uniquely real yet simultaneously abstract examinations of the human condition.
The works in the exhibition, which began on May 20 and will run until Oct. 16, stand out among the YCBA collection, as most of the museum’s exhibits date back to the Tudor Period. In his art, the 58-year-old artist highlights recent events that have garnered public attention, including school shootings and protests.
Perhaps the most shocking of his works, however, is a self portrait. As viewers enter the gallery and walk past the information table, they are met with “Self 1991” — a mold of Quinn’s likeness filled with ten pints of his own blood. While jarring at first to some, the piece examines an important message about the tenuousness of human life.
Quinn described the work as “portraiture in its most absurd form” during a visit, according to Anissa Pellegrino, YCBA assistant shop manager.
This tension between violence and the sacrosanctity of life can also be seen throughout the remaining five works in the exhibition.
Four of the works in particular do this through the use of both photorealism and abstraction — taking inspiration from press photos of historical events but adding symbolic elements.
The work, titled “History Painting Emma [X] González Speaks at a Rally for Gun Control (Fort Lauderdale, 17 February 2018) RWB,” captures a moment of grief during a rally following the mass school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida in 2018.
Quinn depicts González in a photo-realist painting, an art form in which an artist studies a photograph and then attempts to reproduce the image as realistically as possible.
However, Quinn contributes an additional element to the portrait of González, by scattering the canvas with paint. According to YCBA’s website, the smearing spatters of color are meant to portray the visceral emotions of the rally’s participants at that moment. This combination of the photo-realist depiction and the artist’s abstract interpretation adds to the emotional depth of each photographed moment Quinn has chosen, resurfacing the emotions in each photo back to the present.
Quinn’s splatters also speak to the distortion and constant inundation of news, despite the intimate emotional effects stories have on those directly impacted.
“History Painting (London, 8 August 2011) ROYBWN” works in a similar way, with the photo’s subject being Mark Duggan, a Black British man who was killed by police in North London in 2011. The streaks of paint on this photo blaze with the fire in back of a grounded protestor.
“History Painting Ieshia Evans Protesting the Death of Alton Sterling (Baton Rouge, 9 July 2016) GPBWOR” memorializes a photo of racial injustice protester Ieshia Evans. In addition to adding the paint, Quinn has divided the photograph into four distinct panels, allowing viewers to observe the moment from new perspectives.
Peter Hoffenberg, associate professor of history at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa, visited the exhibition and noted the distinction between abstraction and realism.
“That’s not the way the world is…” Hoffenberg said, pointing to an 18th-century painting of a royal dog.
“This is the way the world is,” he said contrastingly, circling back to an abstract landscape by Joseph Mallord William Turner.
Abstraction, chaos, imperfection — these are often more real than the supposedly realistic artworks, Hoffenberg explained.
The YCBA’s website notes this stark contrast between Quinn and most of the other artists on display: “Traditional history paintings fictionalized depictions of contemporary events to glorify nation and empire.”
The realness of the photographs are not enough to capture the nuance and emotion behind the events Quinn highlights.
“Quinn’s History Painting (Kiev [Kyiv], 22 January 2014) YGORBW”, for example, covers a photo-realist painting of police violence against protesters in Ukraine with streaks of orange, purple, and green. Quinn again reimagines the intensity of the moment by dividing the photo into three distinct parts.
The final piece in Quinn’s exhibition, titled “Thames River Water Atlas” (2017), is solely abstract. Here, Quinn separates his abstraction from that of British romanticist painter J. M. W. Turner, speaking to humanity’s consumption and dependence on water as a resource under corporate hold.
This kind of art, Hoffenberg said, “some people can handle, and others can’t.”
Whether or not people can handle it is beside the point for Quinn; walking out of the gallery, viewers are met once again with his looming coagulated head.
The freezer maintaining the work shuts off every few hours, Pellegrino said. “[Quinn] loves ‘the neurosis’ this creates”, as people previously unaware of the source of the constant hum become aware of its bloody origin.
Marc Quinn was born in 1964.
Correction, Sept. 21, 2022: This story was updated to reflect the correct spelling of the artwork names.