Overview:
Quinn seeks to “bring real life into art” and in doing so often deals with contemporary, urban iconography. He has said that “art should have an element of timelessness, because it should be about something that is part of the human condition. But it should also be rooted in the time it's made.” In the bronze sculpture Zombie Boy (Rick) Cu Pb Mn Fe Mg Si (2011) Quinn depicts a man who has completely covered his body with tattoos. The sculpture is cast in bronze but highly worked with the tattoos carved in relief on its surface. The work deals with notions of identity and ritual, and is part of a series of works that portray people who have used their own body as a medium for expression through surgery or other means. Hoxton Venus is a sculpture of Quinn's partner pregnant with their first child. Depicted wearing combat pants and Birkenstock sandals and cast in concrete, the figure is clearly contemporary and yet also connects to traditional depictions of fertility as far back as the prehistoric statuette, the Venus of Willendorf. The Love Paintings were made during an exhibition at Casa Giulietta in Verona. Quinn left blank canvases on the walls of the entrance hall to the museum, a place where visitors traditionally graffiti the walls with love messages, creating “ready made paintings of pure emotion”. The paintings embody Quinn's interest in how contemporary culture can connect with art and how “myth, which is the dreaming of society, is analogous to art”. A group of sculptures of hooded figures – or 'hoodies' – as they have become pejoratively known in the media, represents a modern day youth or 'everyman'. In A Moment of Clarity, a figure in a hooded tracksuit holds a skull, coming face to face with the reality of his own mortality and in Id, Quinn has used a defining image of the London riots - a hooded anonymous figure caught mid-action - to create a concrete sculpture. The two metre high Id presents this figure aggrandised.
