‘I had begun to photograph the frozen flower installations and make prints from them. Then a few years later I began to make oil paintings of flowers. All the flowers in any given painting are bought on the same day at the flower market or from shops in London. Now London is a northern European capital and most of these plants wouldn't grow here together at any time of year. Somehow these paintings are about our disjointed and mediated relationship with nature and what is natural.’
- Marc Quinn

Spanning nearly two and a half metres in width, Ice Desert Rose (2008) is a monumental work from Marc Quinn’s celebrated series of flower paintings. Rendered in sumptuous tones of pink, red and purple, its immaculate hyper-real appearance is offset by its enigmatic mise-en-scène: the flower blooms impossibly upon a ground of glistening snow. Within a practice dedicated to exploring the intersection of life, death, science and art, Quinn’s flower paintings probe the relationship between the natural and manmade worlds. The present work may be seen to relate to his early exploration of this theme in his Eternal Spring sculptures of the late 1990s, and the seminal installation Garden staged at the Prada Foundation, Milan, in 2000. In this work, Quinn brought together over hundred different specimens of flower from around the world and froze them in liquid silicon at full bloom, thus creating a perfect – yet ultimately artificial – image of timeless botanical beauty. The oil paintings extend this notion, not only through their frosted settings but also through their compositional process. Quinn buys the flowers and fruits for any given work on the same day from markets and shops in London, deliberately selecting species that would not ordinarily bloom in similar time periods or locations. He then photographs these fantastical groupings in his studio, before transforming them into photorealist paintings that are at once familiar and unsettling.

Coming to prominence in the early 1990s, alongside the Young British Artists, Quinn’s work is rooted in both art-historical and anthropological concerns, ultimately asking what it means to be human. His flower paintings deftly unite these strands, not only subverting the tradition of still-life painting, but also addressing mankind’s desire to override evolutionary processes. ‘You breed flowers because you like the look of them’, he has explained. ‘You could argue that, actually, by doing this, we’re working for the genes of the flower. So, in a funny way, the plant is making us do its work.’ The vast scale of his paintings feeds this dichotomy: standing before them, we are reduced to ‘the size of an insect’ (M. Quinn, quoted at https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-marc-quinn-s-frozen-garden-brings-snowflakes-into [accessed 26 June 2018]. Each titled after ecological curiosities – in this case, the desert rose – the flower paintings are dark, beautiful tributes to our complex relationship with the natural world.
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