kate moss statue for sale

Artist Marc Quinn has agreed to donate Red Sphinx, a white-bronze sculpture of supermodel Kate Moss in a "heart-shaped yoga pose with red lips," to an auction on February 14 for Red, the brand created by U2 star Bono to raise money to fight the AIDS epidemic in Africa, reports the Wall Street Journal. Another Quinn sculpture, Sphinx (not sure what the difference is between "Red Sphinx" and "Sphinx"), depicting Moss in what looks like Dwi Pada Sirsasana, received controversial coverage when it was unveiled in 2006 because Moss doesn't do yoga (a model posed for the artist) nor does she lead a very yogic lifestyle. Says Quinn, "Kate is a mirror of ourselves, a twisted Venus of our age."

In his exhibition at Mary Boone Gallery, Quinn lionizes Moss by portraying her in goddess form. However, with one exception -- which I'll get to later -- she isn't made to resemble any particular deity. Quinn's parenthetical titles are the only obvious indicators of the goddess implication. Each sculpture is called 'Sphinx' followed by a goddess's name: 'Sphinx (Venus),' 'Sphinx (Victory),' 'Sphinx (Nike).' Coated in a snow-white semi-gloss paint, the bronzes look more like marble than metal (Quinn likens their appearance to "egg shells" or "cinema screens") and show the bikini-clad model bending her body into implausible human-pretzel positions. The legs arch over the shoulders, backwards and forwards, and the pelvis always aligns with the head, so the viewer finds duel focal points -- the crotch and the borehole eyes.

Marc Quinn, previously a constituent of the Young British Artists, is known as something of a body artist. His signal piece is the 1991 self-portrait, 'Self,' molded in nine pints of his own frozen blood. The following decade, he cast a portrait of his newborn son in frozen liquefied placenta. More similar to the Sphinxes are the marble portraits of limbless heroes, such as his monument to the very pregnant and armless artist Alison Lapper, in London's Trafalgar Square. At first, the Sphinxes seem a deviation from the Lapper portrait -- extreme limberness versus underdeveloped limbs -- but both examples manifest a Hellenistic affinity for sculpting the human figure exerted beyond presumed limits.

In reality, Moss lacks the flexibility needed to achieve the knotty feats demonstrated by the Sphinxes (While the sculptor used Moss's proportions, he found a more elastic sitter to strike the yoga poses). Though, that's the point; the Sphinxes are mythical. Moss has long been criticized for setting unattainable standards of female body image. Quinn exaggerates this perception by casting the waif as an expert contortionist who can twist into tantric stances that the viewer could only dream of executing. "Let's see you try, you stiff-jointed fatty," the Sphinxes seem to mock. On top of it all, the model's thirty-something-year-old features have been smoothed to perfection, making her appear even more childish; the only wrinkles reside in the svelte fingers and ballerina toes -- life casts of Moss's real hands and feet -- and in the kissable lips. Likewise, the face of each sculpture is jarringly symmetrical. If not a goddess, she's certainly superhuman.

The conceptual taunt referencing ungraspable beauty is not entirely clear upon first encountering the bronzes. Rather, they look like slick, misogynistic throwbacks from the 1980s. Far more striking than the concept is the craftsmanship: the subtle feline smirk, the detailed digits, the stretched bellybutton, the convoluted compositions. Quinn seems to enjoy the challenges posited by the yoga postures.