Marc Quinn at the Tate Liverpool

Occupying the entire top floor of the Tate Liverpool, this recent survey of works by Marc Quinn, organized by Christop Grunenberg and Victoria Pomeroy, museum director and curator, respectively, contained 30 sculptures, paintings, photos and drawings, produced over the past six years. It's been 11 years since Quinn presented Self, a frozen cast of his head made of nine pints of his own blood that jumpstarted his career as one of the leading "Young British Artists." In the Tate show, viewers were once again confronted with a frozen head in a freezer unit, a work titled Lucas (2001). This time, however, the likeness is not Quinn's, but his three-day-old son's. The head is not made of Quinn's blood but shaped from Lucas's liquidized placenta. Both use human body matter, but Quinn's concern for keeping himself alive seems to have shifted now to the heightened responsibility of a parent; if the freezer unit stops working, "Lucas" dies.

Fascinated with the body and its fragile existence, Quinn has regularly made casts of himself in rubber, glass, lead and plastic that have then been melted, squashed and fractured. Three works in lead from a 1998 series, "Planck Density," lay on the floor in the main gallery, the soft metal bodies scrunched up. Only an odd detail here and there is recognizable as a hand or a nose. Elsewhere in the show, Eternal Spring (Lilies) II (1998) is part of a series of 3-D vanitas sculptures using fresh flowers, which culminated in the 75-ton Garden, a frozen fresh-flower paradise created earlier this year for the Prada Foundation in Milan. In the Tate work, a vase of white calla lilies immersed in liquid silicon rests in a plinthlike freezer unit. To stay fresh, the flowers must remain immersed in the liquid silicon. If removed, they would have blackened and disintegrated.

In another recent series on the theme of immortality, Quinn explores DNA; three examples from that group were included here. The wall-mounted DNA Garden (2002) features a grid of 77 petri dishes. Each dish contains a DNA strand, 75 from plants and two from humans. The dishes are set in a stainless-steel frame outfitted with hinges like an altarpiece. As the frame reflects your image, it reminds you that 99.9 percent of DNA is shared by all humans, and, as the samples look identical, that all life forms developed from the same single-cell amoebas.

Also included in the exhibition, Quinn's recent white marble sculptures of people with missing limbs are powerful works that underscore our discomfort with reality. While an armless figure like the Venus de Milo may signify beauty, seeing naked contemporaries sculpted from sparkling marble, complete with pubic hair but missing an arm or leg (or both), can be unsettling.

The exhibition was rounded out with several large, computer-assisted canvases featuring photo-based images of flowers, plus a drawing installation. Granted, it was difficult to fill this enormous venue with just 30 pieces, but covering the walls of one gallery with a group of 150 drawings of flowers, bodies and sculptural ideas served no purpose other than to take up space. Intended to introduce viewers to the artist's thought processes, the display was the show's weakest link. Quinn proves to be an inept draftsman and many of the pieces are little more than doodles. In general, the exhibition felt sparse and disjointed, with all the work jumbled together in a seemingly random fashion. Ultimately, this eagerly anticipated show failed to live up to expectations.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group