Marc Quinn (b. 1964)

On a large canvas, a fertile orchid expands ravenously while vivid reds and creeping purples bloom in Marc Quinn’s Cylindrical Core Region, 2007. The work is part of a series which Quinn began in 2005, which grew out of his fascination with the evanescence of sublime beauty. To make each hyperrealist composition, Quinn arranged vivid blossoms, and then photographed the composition; the printed image was used as source material for the final painting. As he purchased all the plants from local shops, the paintings depict fantastical combinations of flowers that would never grow together naturally; these are impossible moments rendered in brilliant colour. Thematically, the series looks to the long history of the still life genre, linking Cylindrical Core Region to the brightly coloured works of artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, and, particularly, Georgia O’Keefe. Like O’Keefe’s viscerally feminine paintings, Quinn’s Cylindrical Core Region is similarly fleshy and physical. The densely rich closeup is baroque and sumptuous, but with its overt meditation on temporality, the painting is perhaps most closely aligned to the vanitas of the Dutch Golden Age, in which flowers symbolised the ephemerality of life. By interrogating the relationship between beauty and its degradation, Quinn’s art embraces an unfolding transformation, and Cylindrical Core Region is evidence of such a paradox: although beautifully open and vibrant, the flowers are, in fact, already dead. Transformed by the many layers of representation, the final painting depicts the suspended time of an artificial world.