Overview:

White Cube is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Marc Quinn. This exhibition, Quinn’s first at White Cube London since 2010, includes two new bodies of work and is the culmination of two years of investigation into natural phenomena and our distanced and complex relationship with the environment.

‘The Toxic Sublime’ series are distorted, three-dimensional seascapes that blur the boundaries between painting and sculpture. They begin with an inherently contradictory artistic gesture whereby Quinn submits a photograph on canvas of a sunrise to a process of aggressive alteration. The degraded seascapes are finally bonded to a sheet of aluminium, to be pummelled and contorted by Quinn to create sculptural hybrid objects that not only exhibit the formal elements of classical landscape painting but also are suggestive of something wrecked, as if a pictorial remnant discarded from some kind of physical disaster.

Alongside these paintings, a new series of sculptures, minimal arcs in stainless steel and white concrete, including one measuring over 7.5m long, form part of a body of work titled ‘Frozen Waves’. These primal, gestural shapes originate from the remnants of shells, eroded by the endless action of the waves. In the moment before they disappear and become sand, all conch shells end up in a similar form – an arch that looks like a wave, as though an unwitting self-portrait by nature.

With titles referencing the science of fluid dynamics, Quinn captures this ancient action of time and tide using the most recent three-dimensional technology. Copied and extracted on different scales, and then cast in stainless steel or concrete, the result appears like a sculpture of a wave yet also something primordial and ambiguous, mined from the depths of time; a reminder that the forces that shape nature are more powerful – and will last longer – than us, however much we interfere with the planet. Elegant and minimal, they point to a magical material transformation: the crystallisation of movement into form.