Gavin Turk

Galerist opens the 2012-2013 exhibition season in its Tepebaşı gallery with a sophisticated survey of Gavin Turk’s latest works of seven years period. British artist’s first solo show in Istanbul takes place from September 18th to October 16th, 2012.

Gavin Turk, (1967, Guildford, Surrey, England) works and lives in London. The British artist is the pioneer of various sculpture forms, frequently used and commonly appreciated nowadays in British art like bronze, mummification, references from art icons as well as the use of rubbish in artworks.

Gavin Turk rose to prominence in the early 1990s during the so-called ‘Young British Artists’ phenomenon: a wave of media interest provoked by an ambitious generation of artists with a flair for self-promotion. As an artist with a family name of “Turk”, Gavin Turk makes the irresistible conflation and appropriation of referring the show title to the possessive cultural label "Turk". The title of the show points to a process of cultural translation. This is a play on the convention that exists where exhibitions are frequently titled simply but ostentatiously by the name of the artist suggesting that the work in the show is the entire story or oeuvre of that artist. Art always gets made as a response to various cultural stimuli and also interpreted with these as points of reference. The naming of a show in this way through twisted repetition alludes to the way that an artist's name or signature in today’s terms becomes a kind of brand which in this case is both a national issue and a personal one. Another way of looking at this might be to ask “what point does a cultural boundary occur?”

Gavin Turk