Daily Appreciation
“To me, this sculpture is an addition to a long lineage of archetypal female images, stretching from the Venus of Willendorf in prehistoric times, through Nefertiti’s bust in Egypt, images of the Virgin, and Botticelli’s Birth of Venus in the Renaissance, to Warhol’s Marilyn and in my own work — the sculpture of Alison Lapper. Sphinx is a rebirth of Venus. It is a portrait of Kate Moss’s image, not of herself. An interesting thing about Kate Moss is that, because she never gives interviews, she’s almost purely ubiquitous image. Like the frozen flower garden, which raises the question ‘When does an object becomes an image of itself?’, so Sphinx asks the same question of a person. The yoga-like pose, reminiscent of an Indian sculpture of Shiva, is in a contemporary scene about trying to affect spirit through the body. It also seems to symbolise that Kate’s image is sculpted by society’s collective desire, contorted by outside influences. She is the reflection of ourselves, a knotted Venus for our age, a mirror, a mystery, a sphinx.” — Marc Quinn, Recent Sculptures Catalogue, Groninger Museum, 2006
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