Marc Quinn

Acquired directly from the artist in 2006 by the present owner

Marc Quinn’s outrageously colourful and vibrant Lovebomb belies the artist’s long preoccupation with the contemporary fixation on attaining – and more importantly maintaining - ‘ideal beauty’. Quinn has boosted the natural colours of a flower and enlarged its delicate and fragile structure to overemphasise the qualities we prize in a flower; in doing so he has created something both beautiful in its image and delightfully deviant.

The present work is an extension of his 2000 installation, Garden, an arrangement of one thousand flowers from around the world selected in full bloom, which Quinn sank in twenty-five tonnes of liquid silicone to freeze them, thus creating a botanical impossibility: a garden of seasonal and regional flowers all blossoming together. The artist noted that he had created the perfect image – but that the matter itself was dead. Through this installation, Quinn meditated upon the transience of existence and how the contemporary psyche and scientific advancement compel us to interfere with the natural status quo.

Quinn became perhaps most well-known for his 1991 Self, a cast of his own head made from nine pints of his frozen blood. He achieved further notoriety with his series of sculptures of amputees, modelled as a reinterpretation of fractured Greek and Roman statuary. Far from being a master of novelty, Marc Quinn offers a searing and insightful commentary on how contemporary ideals conflict with nature.