Overview:

‘The Sleep of Reason’ brings together more than 30 works Marc Quinn has produced since 2000. Presenting the wide range of media and materials used by Quinn, the exhibition features a number of his seminal works along with some of his most recent paintings and sculptures, which will be shown for the first time at ARTER.

‘The Sleep of Reason’ revolves around history, time and space, body and identity related themes, which the artist has been exploring since the 1990s and proposes an investigation into the relationship between nature and culture as well the interaction between art and technology through dependency.

The exhibition’s title is inspired by Goya’s etching “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” (from the series of aquatint plates entitled “Los Caprichos”, 1799). In the etching, the artist represents himself sleeping, surrounded by the products of his own imagination, monsters and nightmares.

Named in reference to this etching and departing from its moral and historical context, Marc Quinn’s exhibition at ARTER proposes an extension of our perception towards the realm of the immaterial or that of the invisible by connecting the particular to the universal and challenging our framing of reality. Art theorist Selen Ansen has devised the exhibition around the theme of the “threshold”, as a passageway and as a space of reversibility between internal and external: the historical and abstract notions which refer to the categories that shape our understanding of the world, as well as our relationship to the Other in the construction of our selves.