Skip to navigation Skip to content

Fondation

Marc Quinn The Selfish Gene 2007 a3 1 1280x1027
Marc Quinn, The Selfish Gene. Photo: Stephen White. Courtesy of Jay Jopling/White Cube (London)

Marc Quinn

  • Exhibition
  • Contemporary Art
Look up to address on google map

PHI Foundation 451 & 465 Saint-Jean Street
Montréal, Québec H2Y 2R5

Wednesday to Sunday:
11 AM to 6 PM

Free admission

Curator

Gathering over forty recent works, DHC/ART’s inaugural exhibition by conceptual artist Marc Quinn is the largest ever mounted in North America and the artist’s first solo show in Canada. Marc Quinn is a central figure within British art whose work is principally concerned with the body’s mutability in time, its physical presence in space and its anxiety within culture. His work also poignantly explores mortality, beauty, kinship and the interplay of art and science.

Marc Quinn’s work ranges across a variety of media – from sculpture to painting, drawing and photography – and includes dazzling, if contentious, frozen self-portraits cast from his own head and filled with his own blood to frozen portraits of his infant sons made with their respective placentas and umbilical chords. The latest of these, Sky, is included in this exhibition.

Quinn’s The Complete Marbles, a suite of sculptural portraits of amputees and disabled individuals in sparkling white marble allude to fragmented Greco-Roman statuary while slyly addressing heroism. Quinn has made DNA portraits of his family and of scientist John Sulston, paintings of improbable gardens, and highly evocative wax castings of people with life-threatening illnesses – Chemical Life Support– where the wax is mixed with daily doses of the medications that keep the individuals alive. Another wax portrait of a serene young woman Beauty and the Beast is colored darkly by animal blood.

Digitally manipulated animal flesh is the basis for two stunning Mirror Paintings on view, as well as for Cybernetically Engineered, Cloned and Grown Rabbit, a seven foot bronze sculpture, at once comic and melancholy, of a shaped rabbit carcass. Quinn has arrested the decay of flowers by immersing them in sub-zero silicone and made painted bronze sculptures of supermodel Kate Moss in extreme contortions. Other bronzes include a series of human skeletons, among them The Selfish Gene, which depicts a couple in the throes of love-making.

In 2004 Marc Quinn won a major public art commission for the Fourth Plinth: his Alison Lapper Pregnant, a large marble portrait of a naked, severely disabled and very pregnant woman was installed in London’s Trafalgar Square – a bold and powerful tribute to both disability and motherhood. A fully illustrated catalogue with essays by British art historian Lynda Nead and Montreal psychoanalyst Harvey Giesbrecht accompanies the exhibition.

Biography

Marc Quinn
Marc Quinn was born in London in 1964. He studied History of Art at Cambridge University (1982-1985) and began working as a sculptor in 1984. Marc Quinn is represented by White Cube, London and Mary Boone Gallery, New York. His work is in numerous museum and private collections around the world.

IEX Space Explorers INFINI COVER

Off-Site Location

Space Explorers: THE INFINITE

May 3 October 29

The immersive experience Space Explorers: THE INFINITE, presented in the Old Port, is back in Montreal featuring new captivating content captured in space

Experience Immersion
PHI Event Centre Sexe Desirs Data COVE Rv2

Centre

Sex, Desire and Data

August 1 October 31

An immersive exhibition that explores the connections between sexuality and technology

Exhibition Immersion
PHI Event Centre Myriade Chromatique Credit sylvain dumais COVER

Free

Centre

Chromatic Myriad

August 15 July 31

The PHI Centre showcases a light installation with evolving content, adapting to the seasons and exhibitions

Installation Technology
PHI Event Centre Habitat Sonore SE Ov3

Centre

Habitat Sonore: Listening room

August 23 October 22

Tune out the everyday noise and lose yourself in Montréal’s new immersive listening room

Experience Music
PHI Event PDA Pioneer Numerique COVER

Free

Off-Site Location

New Media Pioneers

September 21 December 30

Presented at Place des Arts, New Media Pioneers celebrates the work of Michel Lemieux of 4D ART and Édouard Lock

Exhibition Immersion
Revolutionnaires fictifs thumb

Foundation

Fictional Revolutionary Leaders – Film POP

September 28

In collaboration with Film POP, the PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art presents Fictional Revolutionary Leaders, a double bill including Gloria Camiruaga’s Popsicles (1984) and Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s Oriana (2022)

Event Contemporary Art
PHI Event Centre Eliza Rose COVE Rv2

Centre

Eliza Rose

October 8

The London-based DJ and singer will get you moving with her grooves celebrating soundsystem music

Performance Music