“The Toxic Sublime” at White Cube’s Bermondsey, London gallery is an exhibition of new work by renowned British artist Marc Quinn — the artist’s first at White Cube London since 2010. Featuring two new bodies of work, the exhibition is the culmination of a two-year investigation into “natural phenomena and our distanced and complex relationship with the environment,” according to White Cube.The materiality of the object, in both its elemental composition and surface appearance, is at the heart of Quinn’s work. The multifaceted, multilayered bodies of work in the exhibition testify to the depth of Quinn’s engagement with materiality, composition, and surface while at the same time reveal the uncompromising and rigorous nature of his practice. Through a wide range of processes and techniques, Quinn presents a poignant reflection on human beings’ paradoxical relationship with nature.The exhibition is named after a series of three-dimensional seascapes with distorted and manipulated surfaces that blur the boundaries between sculpture and painting. Presented alongside the paintings is a new series of minimalist sculptures in stainless steel that form part of a body of work titled “Frozen Waves.” Originating from eroded conch shells, the wave-like forms are captured using the most recent three-dimensional technology.To find out more about “The Toxic Sublime,” which is at White Cube Bermondsey from July 15 to September 13, BLOUIN ARTINFO got in touch with Quinn and asked him a few questions.“The Toxic Sublime” is an intriguing title for your exhibition at White Cube. Why “The Toxic Sublime”? The Toxic Sublime is a mash up of the urban and the bucolic. The Toxic Sublime is a vision of nature through the eyes of a globally warmed world. I took a photograph of a sunrise over the Atlantic ocean, printed it on some canvasses and then began to paint on top of those using the most urban of commercially available media – spray paint. After having applied many different layers, spraying through man-made flotsam and jetsam I found on various beaches I then took the canvasses onto the streets of London and using a grinder, ground the texture of manhole covers to do with water in the city, into the surface of the painting. The canvasses were then stuck down to aluminium which I folded, crushed, smashed and bashed until it seemed like an industrial relic – a piece if debris which might have fallen of the back of a boat or plane. Alongside these paintings are sculptures of fragments of shell scaled up using a 3D scanner print off scaled up from palm size to 7.5 metres, these become like strange primordial creatures swimming through the gallery – strange reflections of deep time.The exhibition is culmination of two years of investigation into natural phenomena and our distanced and complex relationship with the environment. What prompted this investigation and what conclusions did you reach that guided and influenced the works in the exhibition?For me art isn’t about reaching conclusions it is about posing questions and reflecting the world we live in. When standing on various beaches and shorelines around the world, I have that conflicted guilty feeling that by travelling or visiting these places I am helping to destroy them as well. It is this paradox of modern life that is one of the issues that I am addressing in the work.All the works in “The Toxic Sublime” seem to embody a sense of tension and express a sense of anticipation. What sort of reaction and response are you wanting to elicit from viewers? The traditional response to the sublime is one of beauty and being overwhelmed by something slightly out of our control. I guess that is a good a response as any but really I can’t predict what response viewers will have to the work – a work of art always has its own life.
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