Lorenzo Quinn was born on 7 May 1966 in Rome, Italy, the son of Mexican-American actor Anthony Quinn and his wife Iolanda (nee Addolori).[1] Quinn was raised in the United States and Italy and presently lives in Barcelona in Spain.[2] He began practising art as a painter in the early 1980s when he enrolled at the American Academy of Fine Arts in New York City.[3] In 1988 he married Giovanna Cicutto and the family moved to Spain.

In the early 2000s, Quinn made the decision to abandon his acting career to instead devote himself entirely to art. Quinn’s public art includes Encounters, commissioned by Fundatur and donated to Mallorca in 2003. It is now situated in Palma de Mallorca.[7] Further works are on display at King Edward’s Wharf – Creation, Volare and Crossing a Millennium – with their characteristic focus on the hand, the human form, and the circle. The exhibition Equilibrium took place in November 2009, coinciding with the installation of Give and Take III in Berkeley Square for six months. Included in the show were several new sculptures, including What Came First? (male and female forms lying in egg-shaped hemispheres) and Home Sweet Home (a marble woman cocooned in barbed wire). Quinn’s Forces of Nature series of sculptures have been displayed in England, Italy, the United States, Singapore, Netherlands, Qatar and Monaco.[8] In October 2018 the sculpture Stop Playing was donated to the city of Venice and installed in Forte Marghera.

Among other commissions, for the people of Birmingham, in October 2005, Quinn created the sculpture Tree of Life[10] representing those that had perished in the Birmingham air raids in World War II. Quinn has worked on commissions for the Sports Academy ASPIRE in the Gulf states[11] and many in Spain where he currently lives with his wife and children. He also has a permanent exhibition at the Rafart Gallery[12] in Almenar, Spain. Quinn designed the Ride The World trophy for the MOTO GP championships.[13] The trophy was presented to Valentino Rossi in 2004.[14] In December 2020 the sculpture You are the World was installed at AFAS Software – Leusden, in the Netherlands; previously, in the same year, the sculpture Give toured the cities of Italy remaining on display first in Florence, then in Palermo and the following year in Pietrasanta.[15] 2021 was the year of Together, the monumental wire mesh sculpture on display for the annual Exhibition of Art d’Égypte, titled “Forever is Now”, held in front of the Pyramids of Giza.

In May 2017 the sculpture Support was inaugurated in Grand Canal as a reminder of rising sea levels and climate change problems.[18] In 2019 the sculpture Building Bridges was inaugurated in the basin of the Arsenale in Venice. The sculpture is formed by six pairs of hands representing humanity’s universal values – Friendship, Faith, Help, Love, Hope and Wisdom.[19] In July 2022 Quinn returned to Venice with a new sculpture: Baby 3.0, a mesh sculpture of a baby overlooking the Grand Canal in the garden of the Metropolitan City of Venice