The present lot is by Young British Artist and provocateur Marc Quinn. Cast in painted bronze, the sculpture immediately strikes the viewer as strange and somewhat surreal. The body of Kate Moss has been contorted into a difficult yoga pose and supports a duplication of her own body with her feet. Yet a kind of inverted bathetic shift takes place, as, over the course of experiencing the art, the viewer comes to realise Quinn’s meditation on the nature of the human condition and on its contemporary manifestation.

The ‘true nature’ of the model - if there is one at all - is unknown to us, and Quinn emphasises this mystery through his work: ‘She is the reflection of ourselves, a knotted Venus for our age, a mirror, a mystery, a sphinx’ (Marc Quinn, Recent Sculptures Catalogue, Groninger Museum, 2006). Just as our own particular drives and anxieties distort our personal image of Moss, Quinn’s sculpture is of a body at once twisted, deified, and - like all Gods - mute.