Far from conventional despite the use of traditional sculptural materials like marble and bronze, Marc Quinn’s latest show features personalities well known for their experimentation with cosmetic surgery and sexual transformation.

But while Quinn may be attempting to ask questions about the role of transformative surgery and its impact on one’s identity, it’s a point we struggle to grasp. For many of us, foreign to this world of bodily alteration, the work seems to reduce these individuals to a sculptural freak show; yet our expectations deny us their pure shock value because Quinn’s sculpture has represented the bizarre body before.

Underlying the show is a morbid fascination with the ephemerality of beauty and the onset of decay. In the main gallery, Chelsea Charms’s twenty-six-pound (each) breasts are carved with the skill of classical nudes, with veins radiating like crooked spider’s legs from her nipples. A flaw in the marble on her left breast reminds us of the imperfection of the body, even a highly-plasticised one. Upstairs, immortalised in bronze, Pamela Anderson is posed like a double Venus pushing her silicone breasts toward the sky; the deep cracks on her parted lips jarringly call to attention the short-lived nature of phony perfection. That none of her beauty is natural is clear: her fully-manufactured alter ego has no navel, thus denying evidence of her humanity. The large skull partly obscured by flower petals in the painting behind her, and the mould growing over the strawberry in another, recalls the age-old idea of the painted vanitas. We wonder how long The Ecstatic Autogenesis of Pamela will, in fact, be in ecstasy.

A spectacle at best, this show takes Quinn’s work in a direction that makes it difficult to empathise with the ideas he presents. The art is as vacant as the stares these fake bodies give. Until Jul 3

ELIZABETH BUHE