Marc Quinn: Chronos & Cosmos

Marc Quinn, born in 1964, belongs to the Young British Artists group which became famous in 1997 through the legendary Sensation exhibition of works from Charles Saatchi's collection. Quinn's pioneering sculpture was Self, a frozen sculpture of his head, made with 4.5 litres of his own blood, extracted over five months. In 2005 his statue of Alison Lapper, a woman born with no arms and severely shortened legs, attracted much attention whilst exhibited from on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. With his materials and techniques, Quinn challenges the boundaries between art and science. Besides using ice, glass, metal, marble and lead, he has experimented with flowers and plants frozen in silicon. Many of Quinn's works are in the vanitas tradition, showing clear, concrete references to classic works of art history. Germano Celant is an Italian art historian, critic and curator who coined the term Arte Povera and wrote many articles and books on the subject. Adam David Rutherford is a British geneticist, author, broadcaster and frequent contributor to The Guardian. His critically acclaimed first book, Creation (2013) was nominated for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize. Subsequent publications include A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes (2017); The Book of Humans: The Story of How We Became Us (2018); Humanimal: How Homo sapiens Became Nature's Most Paradoxical Creature-A New Evolutionary History (2019) and How to Argue with a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality (2020).