MARC QUINN (BRITISH, b.1964)
Separation of Body and Soul BGYRMW
oil on canvas
125 x 189 cm. (49 1/4 x 74 1/4 in.)
(unframed)
Painted in 2009

Provenance
The artist, from whom acquired by the present owner

Marc Quinn has often been associated with Damien Hirst as one of the prominent and founding members of the British contemporary art movement. He gained prominence in the early 1990s, when he created a now famous self-portrait made from his own frozen blood.

In the case of this painting, Separation of Body and Soul BGYRMW, and many of the works within the Separation of Body & Soul series, Quinn plays with medium and material to create the desired effect. The black and white hyperrealist still life painting explodes into life with the splatter of the thick, brightly coloured paint, with heavy impasto. Upon first glance, the work appears to be photographic given it’s hyperrealist style, however upon closer inspection it becomes clear that Quinn creates in a combination of realism and abstraction. His still-life, traditionally one of the oldest forms of subject-matter in this painting, is conversely derived from the photographic arrangement of flowers.

Time is the subject of the work through an emphasis of paradigm shifts. The backdrop is a physically captured frozen moment in time, taken by a camera and translated onto the canvas, completely devoid of decay. In stark contrast is the unpredictable, instant splatters of paint on the still surface of flowers.