Marc Quinn: The Toxic Sublime, White Cube ★★★★★

To accuse Marc Quinn of making shock-value art ignores all the fascinating conceptual rigour which underlies his work. Marc Quinn paintings, sculptures and drawings all wrestle with the relationship between art and science through vivid, arresting motifs that are not afraid to embrace controversy. DNA, life-cycles, mortality and identity all crop up in Quinn's vastly complex work.

Marc Quinn's most famous work

His early sculpture Self (1991), a cast of the artist’s head made from eight pints of his own frozen blood, got the public talking as a bold re-imagining of the traditional self-portrait. In 2005, Quinn’s sculpture of the heavily pregnant and disabled Alison Lapper was exhibited on the Fourth Plinth at London’s Trafalgar Square to resounding critical acclaim. And of course there's that Marc Quinn Kate Moss sculpture of the iconic supermodel contorted into a modern version of the mythical Sphinx. 

White Cube Bermondsey exhibition

Quinn’s solo exhibition at White Cube is the product of two years detailed research into humanity’s distanced and complex relationship with nature. It includes two new bodies of work: the first series, 'The Toxic Sublime', comprises distorted three-dimensional seascapes that blur the boundaries between painting and sculpture. Each piece began with the same photograph of an orange-tinted sunrise, which was then transferred onto canvas and then aluminium in a process of extensive alterations and distortions. The results are some fascinating hybrid fragments: a pictorial remnant of artificial erosion.

The second series, ‘Frozen Waves’, comprises sculptures – one seven metres long – in the form of minimal arcs in stainless steel and white concrete. Their shapes look like conch shells, eroded by the rhythmic action of the crashing waves. In the moment before they disappear and become sand, all conch shells end up in a similar shape: an arch that looks like a wave, like an unwitting imprint left behind by nature. Quinn’s work is a compelling reminder that no matter how much humans interfere with the planet, the forces that shape nature are more powerful – and more enduring – than we are.

A palpable force in British contemporary art, Marc Quinn's White Cube exhibition is the most compelling show on our calendar this summer.