Gavin Turk

This first ever major museum solo exhibition of work by British artist Gavin Turk (b. Guildford, 1967) is organized in collaboration with The Hague Gemeente Musem. It will present a wide selection of his highly varied work from the last fifteen years, ranging from waxwork portraits of himself to his recent screen printed self-portraits on canvas. Turk is engaged in a constant investigation of what it means to be an artist. Much of his work has to do with issues of authorship, authenticity, originality and value.

At his degree show in 1991, Turk presented a completely empty studio containing only a Beuys-type showcase displaying a blue English Heritage plaque inscribed ‘Borough of Kensington / Gavin Turk Sculptor / Worked Here 1989-1991’. The Royal College of Art was not amused and refused to give Turk his MA. At the very moment when Young British Artists like Damian Hirst, Tracy Emin and Sarah Lucas were launching themselves as cult stars, Turk set out to parody the art world’s fixation on things like the personality cult surrounding artists. It often seems as if more cultural and economic value is ascribed to the artist’s signature than to the work of art itself. Turk’s work can be seen as one big disappearing trick. Although it is invariably about ‘Gavin Turk’, we learn almost nothing about Turk as an individual. He hides behind an alter ego with the same name and profession but widely differing personas, making – for example – waxwork portraits of himself as a dead Che Guevara, a mechanical Turk or a tramp. At times Gavin Turk seems virtually indistinguishable from other artists. He quotes freely from the work of major predecessors. His spectacular waxwork self-portraits, objects, photographs and screen prints offer – as it were – a tour of art history, with references to the work of Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte, Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, Robert Morris, Marcel Broodthaers, Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol (to name but a few).

Exhibition catalogue, Gavin Turk. The Negotiation of Purpose, bilingual French/English with text by Roel Arkesteijn and an interview with the artist by Louisa Buck. 112 p, 27x19 cm, hardcover. June 07.

Gavin Turk
The Negotiation of Purpose