ARTER – space for art present Marc Quinn The Sleep Of Reason on view 8 February–27 April 2014.
Marc Quinn‘s works often abound with references to the complex process of creation, linking human history to the cyclic temporality of the universe. The self-portraits he has been producing since 1991 using his own frozen blood, or his sculptures that invert the aesthetic norms culturally standardized for the human body, underline the artificial, temporal and historical nature of dualisms that define human life (self/other, body/mind, nature/culture) while exploring the mutual belonging of differences or binary oppositions such as life/death, birth/destruction.
The exhibition’s title is inspired by Goya’s etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1799), in which the artist represents himself sleeping, surrounded by the products of his own imagination, monsters and nightmares. Named in reference to this etching yet 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.
Marc Quinn‘s works offer the “inside” a new, fascinating and troubling visibility, whereas the “outside” is revealed as being constitutive of the “inside,” both finding a common ground by being re-cast in the artificiality of the artwork. In his works, “the body” operates as a site through which the artist suggests new readings of the relationship between the “inside” and the “outside.” Art theoretician Selen Ansen has devised the exhibition around the theme of “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.
The exhibition at ARTER features a number of Marc Quinn‘s most recent works that will be shown for the first time. Among these is Held by Desire (Square Root) (2014), a colossal bonsai tree developed using 3D scanning technology and modelled after the natural form of a 250 year-old bonsai tree which is part of the artist’s own collection of plants. Historically used as a focus for contemplation, the bonsai tree is, for Quinn, a microcosm of our relationship with nature: one in which human desire attempts to manipulate nature to its own ends, however, ultimately an untended bonsai tree will reclaim its natural size and state. By controlling it obsessively, but making the sculpture two and a half meters tall, Quinn demonstrates how the symbol of control has lost itself to become a symbol of lack of control.
The Sleep of Reason also includes Marc Quinn‘s six new tapestry ‘paintings’ all titled The Creation of History, which show images of nameless insurgents whose faces remain anonymous in the shadow of their hoods. These are iconic images captured by journalists reporting on recent uprisings in Brazil, Greece, Egypt, India and the UK over the past three years. The tapestries are sculptures of images woven from disparate threads and are made using a jacquard loom, the first digital image machine in the world dating from early 19th century.
ARTER – space for art
Istiklal Caddesi, 211
Beyoglu, Istanbul
Turkey
Hours: Tuesday–Thursday 11–19h,
Friday–Sunday 12–20h
Admission free