Marc Quinn: Drawn from Life

“The museum is an unfinished total artwork. We’re continuing the process”. Marc Quinn, 2017.

Marc Quinn: Drawn from Life is an exhibition of twelve new sculptures by the leading British artist, Marc Quinn (b. 1964). It is the first time this new body of work – entitled All About Love – has been exhibited anywhere in the world.

Quinn has long been inspired by Sir John Soane’s Museum and, like Soane, is a collector. He surrounds himself in his studio with objects, ephemera, artworks and antiquities. These new works have emerged from Quinn’s interests in the idea of the fragment – a subject that has huge resonance with the Museum.

Each of the twelve sculptures is created from casts of Quinn and his muse, the dancer Jenny Bastet, in a series of embraces. Their interlinked arms appear to be fighting, loving, holding or supporting – or even all at once – reflecting Quinn’s recurring fascination with the physical ambiguities of human emotion.

Displayed around the Museum among the constellation of objects that Soane assembled over his lifetime, Quinn’s works invite us to reflect on the nature and meaning of time.

#DrawnFromLife

Hear a Soane Museum curator give a brief, 15-minute introduction to the exhibition, every Thursday at 15:00 in the Soane Gallery. Free, just turn up.

This exhibition has been made possible through the support of the Sir John Soane’s Museum Trust and Christian Levett.