Interview transcript
Ron Warren: This is an exhibition of new work by Marc Quinn, a British artist born in 1964. All the Time in the World is the title of the exhibition. It’s cast bronze seashells. The artist is interested in the confluence of science and art, in the natural world and ourselves.
He’s probably best-known for the piece he did in 1999 called Self which was a portrait of his own head cast in his own blood and frozen, so he’s also interested in this idea of things, preserving the image of himself and in this case preserving the form of a shell which is of course a natural form.
He’s adapted it to science where he’s taken a raw shell, had it done in a 3D scanner and blown it up to giant proportions and casted it in bronze. There is a sharp contrast in the surfaces of the shells from the highly polish interior surfaces to the exterior which is quite an effect, you get that also in real shell. When they become this size they become very much related to our own bodies so many people said that they wanna crawl into them which, you know, you do feel like you will be becoming that shell organism yourself, you wanna crawl into that shell. These shells were first shown last years at the Ocean and Graphic Museum in Monte Carlo and are being shown now in New York at our exhibition and they also will be included in the exhibition of his work opening at the Foundation Giorgio Cini during The Venice Biennale at the end of May.
The exhibition was on view at Mary Boone’s Chelsea outpost on 24th street until June 29, 2013.
Images © Marc Quinn, courtesy of the Mary Boone Gallery. This interview © galleryIntell