Portraits of Landscapes represent a portfolio of eight prints showing details of Marc Quinn's hyper realistic floral oil paintings. Since the 1990s Marc Quinn has been exploring the relationship between nature and beauty and the manipulation of both, developing his artistic practice through the themes of vanitas, mementum mori, the suspension of the passage from life to death and the search for eternal life and beauty. Portraits of Landscapes is a visual inquiry into the quest for beauty achieved by means of nature manipulation. His flowers, so colorful that they almost appear excessive, have a very sensual, gleaming and fleshy surface. Frozen in time, they meditate on the possibility to defeat mortality through scientific knowledge and artistic expression.
“ I remember visiting a flower market one day and noticing how all these flowers that shouldn't be available at the same time could be purchased so easily in one place because they are flown in from halfway around the world. It perfectly illustrates how human desire constantly reshapes nature's limitations. „