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Introduction
| Early days | Renaissance
| Modern art
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 'Self'
by Marc Quinn, 1991 |
Damien Hirst
Anatomy has resurfaced as a major theme in modern art. Damien Hirst's
pickled animals – bisected cows and sheep suspended in tanks filled
with formaldehyde – are perhaps the most well-known anatomical works.
Anthony Noel Kelly
While Hirst's installations caused a stir, the art world was rocked
by an altogether more macabre scandal in 1997. At the London Contemporary
Art Fair, British artist Anthony Noel Kelly exhibited a series of casts
of cadavres, painted silver and pinned to a wall. The aim of the exhibition
was, according to Kelly, to look at anatomy in an historical context.
Indeed, historical comparisons were to be made – between Kelly and the
Victorian grave robbers.
A former butcher and abattoir worker, Kelly had obtained permission to sketch dismembered body parts at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. However, Kelly wanted to go further than simply sketching body parts. He paid a lab technician at the college to smuggle a human torso, severed heads, limbs and other body parts out of the college, and he then used these to make casts. Kelly was arrested and charged with stealing human bodies, and sentenced to nine months in prison.
Marc Quinn
While Kelly went to extremes in sourcing his materials, it is not
altogether unusual for artists to use human organic matter to make their
point. Marc Quinn, a friend of Damien Hirst, for example, is famous for
exhibiting sculptural self-portraits filled with his own blood.
Image: The artist