Marc Quinn's freak show

A marble sculpture of a man in boxer shorts, about twice human scale, stands tall at the centre of White Cube’s Hoxton Square headquarters. A quiet, ruminative smile emanates from his bearded face. He’s an ordinary young man but for one startling fact — he is pregnant. Meet Thomas Beatie, formerly a woman, Tracy Lagondino, who has already given birth twice and will do so again later this year.

Two for one: in The Ecstatic Autogenesis of Pamela, 2010, Marc Quinn creates Anderson as a pair of conjoined twins with two pairs of those famously enhanced breasts

Beatie is one of a number of people who have altered their faces and bodies drastically through surgery and hormonal treatment and form the spectacular cast for the latest sculptures by Marc Quinn, the one-time YBA who brought you the self-portrait formed from his own blood and the vast marble sculpture of Alison Lapper, a pregnant sufferer of a congenital disorder not unlike thalidomide, on the fourth plinth.
The pregnant man is the centrepiece of Quinn’s show of all-new work. He is accompanied by several bronzes of two transsexual people: Allanah, who used to be a man, but now has breasts and surgically enhanced lips, though she has kept her penis, and Buck, who was once a woman but has reduced his breasts and now sports a full beard and a bald pate — he, too, has kept his female genitals. Elsewhere are Chelsea, who retains her original gender but has vast balloon-like silicone breasts, and Catman who has adopted feline features through surgery and tattoos. Two celebrities need no introduction, Michael Jackson — the subject of two marble heads — and a conjoined pair of Pamela Andersons in bronze.

Classical pose: Thomas Beatie, 2009, is a marble of the real-life woman turned married man who carried a child for his wife after her hysterectomy

Quinn, 46, has long been interested in "otherness", in showing bodies different from the average human form. His sculpture of Lapper was rightly lauded for drawing attention to the confident sexuality and humanity of a woman with a disability. He shares an interest in playing with proportion and scale with the ultra-realist sculptor Ron Mueck, and, like Antony Gormley, his installations force the viewer to reflect on their own bodies in relation to his sculpture and the environment they occupy.

Quinn’s unique trick is to present these unusual bodies in traditional materials such as marble and bronze, which are evocative of the pure, idealistic depictions of the human form in antiquity, the Renaissance and neoclassicism. He tries to prompt us to reconsider our ideas about bodily beauty.

Skin flick: of The Scream, 2010, in pink marble

Allusions to themes of classical art abound in this exhibition — a bronze of Allanah and Buck standing hand-in-hand is a reference to Adam and Eve, while Thomas Beatie evokes images of both the pregnant Virgin and Michelangelo’s David. But there are also unavoidable references to a recent artist: the kitsch sheen of American post-Pop artist Jeff Koons gleams from almost all the sculptures, and a second bronze of Alannah and Buck, this time having sex, recalls Koons’s notorious mid-Eighties works featuring him copulating with his then wife, porn star La Cicciolina.

This "sex sculpture" is the most problematic in the show, and betrays a search for shock at the expense of a more responsible reflection of transgenderism. What made Quinn’s sculptures of Lapper stand out was that she was an ordinary woman, quietly going about her life, who just happened to have a disability; he reflected her integrity and dignity. But Alannah and Buck are not ordinary transgender people — they are porn stars. The sculptures reveal an obsession with their freakiness, rather than a sensitive interest in telling their story.

This show is initially dazzling — it’s beautifully presented, and in one of the two galleries there’s an electric interplay between the coloured flower paintings on the walls and monochrome bronzes and marbles on the floor. The sculptures are immaculately made, and there are astonishing fine details — the stubble in the two heads of Jackson, Buck’s carefully etched tattoos, the tousled hair in the sculpture of two Andersons and the ripples in Beatie’s boxer shorts. But there’s something thin and light about them, despite their weighty materials. The marbles particularly lack real flair in their execution, and I think this derives from Quinn’s technique of casting and modelling them in the studio and then sending them to Italy to be carved. They look like outsize action figures, lacking both life in capturing their subject and liveliness in their construction. Quinn remains a master of the arresting spectacle but behind their dramatic surface, these works are troublingly hollow.

Marc Quinn opens today at White Cube, N1 (020 7930 5373, whitecube.com) and runs until June 26.

Marc Quinn: Alannah, Buck, Catman, Chelsea, Michael, Pamela and Thomas
White Cube
Mason's Yard
SW1