It's rather disconcerting to visit someone whose visage you know only as a bust made from blood. When Marc Quinn opened his front door, I recognised him largely from familiarity with Self - a frozen, life-size self-portrait in livid red - not as a person with skin, hair and brown eyes. Quinn has enjoyed international fame from Self. Bought in its own transparent freezer by Charles Saatchi and exhibited in "Sensation", the work has been the subject of an intriguing urban myth involving Chas, Nigella, a power cut and eight pints of defrosted blood sloshing around Saatchi Towers.
Since the advent of Self, Quinn's position in the contemporary art world has never lagged. His marble sculpture of the pregnant Alison Lapper, whose severe birth defects present a rigorous challenge to the aesthetics of classical sculpture, won the competition for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. He has just had a show in New York and is about to open a new one at Jay Jopling's White Cube in London. Jopling and Quinn have been together from the start. Quinn was the first artist to sign up with the dealer, though he is not from Jopling's Goldsmiths team: he didn't go to art school, but studied art and art history at Cambridge, which might explain the presence of Rogier van der Weyden: the complete works on the shelf in his swanky east London studio.
Six hundred years separate Quinn from the early Netherlandish master, and there are many differences - not least religious fervour - but there is common ground. Like van der Weyden, Quinn gives his work a florid intensity, has rich patrons, has assistants and sells internationally. Van der Weyden's commission to paint scenes for the city hall in Brussels and Quinn's sculpture commission for Trafalgar Square suggest a similar standing. Whether van der Weyden relished being the darling of the court of Burgundy is unknown, but Quinn is enjoying his moment.
His studio/showroom is huge, and immaculate. Beneath the art history books are leather-bound albums embossed with gold dates. There are single albums for the early 1990s and editions for more recent years. There are three or four for 2003. I assume these are albums of press cuttings on Quinn, who is now regarded as a sort of grand old man of the YBA years, a figure whose work is reviewed in all the art magazines, enough to fill a dozen or so gold-embossed cuttings files.
His preparations for the forthcoming White Cube show, "Permanent Life Support", are on display, centring on five life-size wax figures. Each seems physically perfect, but each is dependent on medicine to stay alive: there is an HIV-positive woman, a diabetic man, a man who has had a heart transplant and a woman with lupus. In each, the wax has been mixed with powder containing the relevant drug, so the very substance of the sculpture provides the subject's life support. The fifth sculpture is of a baby boy, Quinn's own son Lucas, who at three months developed extreme lactose intolerance and had to be fed with a formula replacement.
The idea for the show came, in part, from the story of the defrosted head. "This is an extension of the idea that Self only exists as far as it is plugged in," says Quinn. "You don't plug them in, but these people are on permanent support by drugs." Useful things, these urban myths.
