Marc Quinn (b. 1964)
Character Head II
made in bread, cast in lead, on steel support
24½ x 14 x 12in. (62.3 x 35.6 x 30.5cm.)
Executed in 1990, this work is number three from an edition of four

Provenance:
Jay Jopling Fine Art, London.
Saatchi Collection, London.
Private Collection, London.

Exhibited:
London, Grob Gallery, Marc Quinn: Out of Time, 1991 (another from the edition exhibited).
New York, Gagosian Gallery, Incarnate, 1998, no. 8 (another from the edition exhibited; illustrated in colour, unpaged).

Literature:
Marc Quinn, exh. cat., Milan, Fondazione Prada, 2000 (another from the edition illustrated in colour, p. 138).

†λ Please see our Conditions of Sale for definitions of cataloguing symbols.

Specialist Notes:

Previously part of the Saatchi Collection, London, Marc Quinn’s Character Head II, is a quintessential example of the artist’s engagement with traditional art history and materials. Some of the artist’s first sculptures from the late 1980s engaged with the artist’s art historical training, as evidenced early on in works such as Young Dancer Aged 14, 1988 and Marie Antoinette, 1989 which were sculpted in bread, baked, and then cast in bronze. The use of bread as the definitive forming element of these sculptures allows an element of chance to proliferate Quinn’s art. When the dough is applied to the metal armature before entering the kiln, its natural rise and fall serves to enhance the already abundantly expressive nature of Quinn’s character heads. Conceived in the same manner but cast in lead, Character Head II was created around the same time as Quinn’s infamous portrait head Self, 1991, made of the artist’s own blood. This work, along with another edition of Character Head II, was exhibited in the artist’s seminal exhibition at Grob Gallery in 1991, his first major solo exhibition in London.

This work is featured in our How to Collect like a Tate Curator article – find out more here.

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