Provocative and infamous, Marc Quinn is best known as a member of the Young British Artists, whose other associates include Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. Quinn, who was educated at Cambridge, has no formal art training but learned the craft of casting bronze as a studio assistant for Welsh artist Barry Flanagan. Quinn's oeuvre is devoted to reflecting unvarnished real life in art, which he does literally through the use of visceral materials such as blood or faeces and figuratively through cultural and spiritual imagery.

The present lot depicts an image from a series of works of the supermodel Kate Moss cast in a various contorted yoga positions. In relation to the series, Quinn explains that this ‘is not a portrait of a person, it's a portrait of an image twisted by our collective desires.’ Moss, a cultural icon, is cast as a secular deity of present day culture whose public image has been manipulated and warped by the vicissitudes of the media. An image of strange perfection, the distorted Moss stares ahead with fakir-like calm: she represents a comment on the image-obsessed society in which we live, and navigates the boundaries between ideas of ‘cultural’ and ‘natural,’ ‘spiritual’ and ‘physical’.