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Gavin Turk
Gavin Turk continually investigates what it means to be an artist and many of his works deal with issues of authorship, authenticity and originality.
Turk has made his own version of works by Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, Marcel Broodthaers, Réné Magritte and Andy Warhol in works that both disguise the ‘real’ artist as well as reveal his horizon of influence. Concerned with the ‘myth’ of the artist and the ‘authorship’ of a work, Turk’s engagement with this modernist, avant-garde debate stretches back to the ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp. In the early 1990s, Turk made a number of works based on his own signature that comment on the value that the artist’s name can confer onto a work. He has also made a number of photographic and sculptural self-portraits that often involve some degree of disguise such as his best-known sculpture ‘Pop’ (1993), a waxwork of Gavin Turk as Sid Vicious in the stance of Warhol’s Elvis Presley or ‘Che’ (1999) where he posed as the dead revolutionary Che Guevara. More recently, Turk has taken inspiration from the street, making sculptures of ordinary, everyday objects such as bin bags, sleeping bags or polystyrene coffee cups in bronze that is then painted to appear hyper-real. The works are wry and ironic, again underlining the way that an artist can transform an object’s value, and confer a canonical status to something that is literally ‘rubbish’ and usually overlooked.
Turk has also made large-scale installations, such as his work ‘The Golden Thread’ (2004), which was a huge mirrored labyrinth, referring obliquely to the anonymous architecture of corporations and retail outlets. The work is essentially ‘empty’, providing not an object for contemplation but a journey or tunnel for the viewer to be constantly presented with nothing but their own reflection.
Gavin Turk was born in Guildford in 1967 and lives and works in London. He has participated in several important group exhibitions such as Istanbul Biennial (1999), ‘Century City’, Tate Modern, London (2001), ‘Remix: Contemporary Art and Pop’, Tate Liverpool (2002) and ‘Coollustre’, Collection Lambert en Avignon (2003). Solo exhibitions include South London Gallery (1998), Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva (2000), The New Art Gallery, Walsall (2002) and Schloss Eggenberg, Graz (2006).
More on Gavin Turk
| Artworks | |
 | I 4 Images |
 | II 4 Images |
 | III 4 Images |
 | IV 3 Images |
 | V 4 Images |
 | VI 4 Images |
 | IX 4 Images |
 | VIII 4 Images |
 | Related Texts |
| Tonight, Manzoni, I'm Going to be Gavin Turk by Alex Farquharson | |
| CV | |
| Bibliography | |
| The Unbearable Awkwardness of Things A Conversation between Gavin Turk and Tim Marlow | |
| Text from Collected Works 1989-1993 by Andrew Wilson | |
| Exhibitions | |
| The Golden Thread 23 Jan—28 Feb 2004 | |
| A Marvellous Force of Nature 17 Sep—2 Oct 1993 | |
| Artist's Publications | |
| Copper Jubilee 2002 | |
| Collected Works 1989 – 1993 1993 | |
| Artist's Publications Available in the Bookshop |
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| Collected Works 1989 – 1993 1993 | |
 | Related Links |
| http://collection.britishco... British Council | |
| http://www.tate.org.uk/brit... Tate Online | |
 | Back to Artist Index |