Marc Quinn - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Tuesday, October 11, 2011 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Acquired directly from the artist

  • Catalogue Essay

    Executed by using airbrushed oil paints on a huge canvas, Red Lantern Cove (2010) is a celebration of colour, life, sensuality and beauty. The image creates an exotic dream-like world which is both hyperreal and unnatural. By virtue of the scale and low point of view, the viewer becomes immersed in this strange world which, while drawing upon the genres of still life and landscape, renders the flowers and plant forms wholly artificial – such plants of course would never appear in the same groups and context in nature.

    In his flower paintings, Quinn exposes the transience of life freezing a moment in time. The inevitable decay of youth, beauty and life. But he also examines the relationship between nature and culture and how they interact and influence each other. It is about human evolution led by human desire, about what happens when human beings manipulate the objects surrounding them but at the same time it is also about the miracle and celebration of life.

    “I remember visiting a flower market one day and noticing how all these flowers that shouldn’t be available at the same time could be purchased so easily in one place because they are flown in from halfway around the world. It perfectly illustrates how human desire constantly reshapes nature’s limitations. The fact that these flowers are always available to us is artificial and unnatural.”
    (Marc Quinn)

33

Red Lantern Cove

2010
Oil on canvas.
168.5 × 271 cm (66 3/8 × 106 3/4 in).
Signed, titled and dated ‘Red Lantern Cove Marc Quinn 2010’ on the reverse.

Estimate
£85,000 - 120,000 ‡♠

Sold for £91,250

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

12 October 2011
London