Marc Quinn

Five Paintings

These five new paintings by Marc Quinn continue to explore one of the artist's key theres: our mediated and disjointed relationship with nature and what is natural. These fruits and flowers are blossoming in a winter landscape but would never grow together. They point to our desire-led relationship with nature.

In 2001, Marc Quinn made a DNA portrait of Nobel Laureate Sir John Sulston, one of the sequencers of the human genome. These paintings also seem to address the world of genetics. Each of the lowers used in the paintings has been genetically manipulated, either through natural selection or human breeding programs, and yet the paradox is that they are still natural and that even in these paintings they are still working towards their genetic goal - the propagation of the species. Seeing them here might encourage us to buy them in the shops which will lead gardeners to gros more which will lead to the survival of the species. The line between manipulation and manipulated is blurred. Our desire is their triumph.

These five paintings exist in our world of melting ice-caps, hurricanes and flooding, where climate and seasons are no longer a given.