LONDON — Marc Quinn led the way through his East London studio late last month, past a marble sculpture of a fetus, a photorealist painting of raw meat and a bronze statue of Kate Moss in a yoga position.
Entering his workroom, he casually walked over distorted three-dimensional canvases of seascapes strewn across the floor. He pointed to others hanging on the wall. “I took one picture of a sunrise,” he said, “then I got the photograph, printed it on canvas, and then basically I fast-forwarded it through the Industrial Revolution until now.”
The works form part of Mr. Quinn’s new exhibition, “The Toxic Sublime,” which runs through Sept. 13 at White Cube Bermondsey, in London. Each seascape is an attempt to meld the traditional romanticism of painters such as J.M.W. Turner with layers of tape, paint and imprints of drains and debris, to illustrate the environment’s degradation.