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Portrait Gallery buys Quinn's head made of frozen blood
Louise Jury, Chief Arts Correspondent10 Sep 2009
The National Portrait Gallery has bought one of the most important works of the BritArt era.
It is the most recent of Marc Quinn's self-portraits, made from his own frozen blood, and sold for a special price of £300,000.
The work is the fourth in a series started in 1991 documenting the artist's ageing. A new cast is made every five years.
It will be the only one of the series on public display in Britain.
The first three are overseas - including one once owned by Charles Saatchi, wrongly said to have melted when builders turned his freezer off.
The gallery said "extensive knowledge has built up in the care, conservation and display of such work".
It has been designed so it can be melted, re-cast and re-frozen when it has to be moved.
The head, made from about nine pints of blood, joins a collection of self-portraits dating back 450 years.
Gallery director Sandy Nairne said: "Quinn's Self is an outstanding acquisition - an icon of contemporary British art. It is startling and revealing."
Quinn, 45, said he was thrilled to be there. "To me, this sculpture came from wanting to push portraiture to an extreme, a representation which not only has the form of the sitter, but is made from the sitter's flesh.
"It only exists in certain conditions, in this case being frozen, analagous to me, with a person being alive. I couldn't think of a better place for it than the National Portrait Gallery."
The Art Fund charity gave £100,000 towards the work with more grants from bodies including The Henry Moore Foundation.
Andrew Macdonald, acting director of The Art Fund, said the head was a "fantastic example of Quinn's capacity to stretch the notion of what portraiture can be".
To mark the acquisition, the artist will discuss his work with Tim Marlow, the art historian and broadcaster, in a talk on 12 November.
