Curated by Aindrea Emelife and Francesca Pini

HISTORYNOW (2020 – present), exhibited for the first time at the Archaelogical Museum of Venice, surveys our increasing digital interdependence at a vital point in history. In 2020, our online world expanded dramatically, a phenomenon catalysed by growing restrictions on physical contact due to the global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The HISTORYNOW paintings start life as screenshots, enlarged and pigment-printed on canvas before Quinn overpaints them with gestural strokes that alternately distort, blur, and highlight aspects of the image and text beneath. Retaining the iPhone’s original proportions, these uncanny, colossal screengrabs communicate the distorted way in which the pandemic has been largely experienced by many from home, via screens, presenting a familiar, first-person account of the daily updates and viral moments that we consumed – and which consumed us – during this shared historical moment.

HISTORYNOW becomes a scrolling journey through our endlessly refreshed digital feeds of visual culture and breaking news alerts. Placed in dialogue with the museum’s own collection from classical antiquity, the exhibition invites us to reflect on society past-and-present, our ideals, our social mores, and the hopes and fears that define not only the time we live in, but ultimately our shared human condition.

«Marc Quinn’s art has often been concerned with the way humans experience and record history. The artist’s History Paintings is a contemporary evolution of the genre it shares its name with. […] By combining the individual with the universal, HISTORYNOW is both a deeply personal journey (asserting that “I was here, on this day”), and a story of humanity experienced on a much larger scale, as captured through the dual lens of daily news – paper and social media reportage and use of the iPhone screenshot as a keyhole into a singular—yet familiar—perspective. […] Quinn [usa] Quinn [uses] the format of a mobile-phone as a blueprint for his compositions: zoomed in, the artist’s selection of the news story, and often not its headline, renders it a digital scrap, a technological tear-out—a transformation emphasised even more so when layered paint is used to remove and reveal certain words, phrases, details, and imagery.»

Aindrea Emelife

«The narrative that unfolds as an unending flow between the “ganglia” of the web and social media makes technology seductive, creative, participatory; it conveys icons, creates characters. […] In this unstoppable magma of viral images that circulate very quickly—of stories produced every thousandth of a second, endlessly feeding our voyeurism—Marc Quinn, with his HISTORYNOW series, makes a crucial selection of a few symbolic moments from the zettaflood for crystallising in the form of “heroic” paintings, intended to immortalise significant beats in our globalised narrative: to remove them from the fast-food counter of news consumption so that they might be historicized instead. […] In his paintings Marc Quinn acts on the immediacy of history, hic et nunc—here and now—while it’s still unfolding all around us, still novel and raw, by selecting as his subjects the news and characters that animate it.»

Francesca Pini