1,236 research outputs found
Gavin Turk in the house: a reader
No full textWritten and illustrated by Deborah Curtis; with a conversation between Tim Marlow and Gavin Turk
Cracks in Reality: Gavin Turk / Jens Wolf
No full textWhat is reality and where do its abstraction, original and copy, overlap? Today the boundaries are in flux and are repeatedly dissolving. With the exhibition, "Cracks in Reality - Gavin Turk/ Jens Wolf', Marta Herford presents two artists from its own collection whose works correspond with each other in dialogue form: Gavin Turk, who belongs to the generation of Young British Artists, and Jens Wolf, a representative of new abstraction in painting. Almost forty works, including large-format paintings, filigree sculptures and a temporary mural work created especially for the exhibition, open up a space to think about appropriation and imitation, all the while pointing up astonishing references to art history. Concepts of authorship and originality are scrutinized here by both artists with an ironic, critical undertone
Gavin Turk
No full textPart of the YBA (Young British Artist) movement of the mid-1990s, Gavin Turk has created pioneering works of contemporary art using materials such as painted bronze, wax, and garbage. His installations, sculptures, and images refer to issues of authorship, authenticity, and identity and toy with the art historical establishment. Featuring numerous color illustrations, the volume includes Turk's major works since the early 1990s as well as three texts. One of these, an original essay by Iain Sinclair, contextualizes the artist's work under the umbrella of psycho-geography, including the impact of London on Turk's persona
Gavin Turk's studio
No full textExploring the inside workings of the artist studio Gavin Turk exhibited his 'Gavin Turk's Studio'
Gavin Turk
No full textGavin Turk is a leading figure in British contemporary art. His 1991 degree show work Cave, a blue ceramic plaque commemorating his occupancy of a studio, and Pop, the waxwork figure of himself as Sid Vicious, are among the iconic artworks of the 1990s. His "self-portrait" signatures and his finely crafted sculptures of everyday objects (such as cardboard boxes cast in bronze) bring the commonplace into an art space and challenge the viewer to engage in new ways. In 2003 he created the major sculpture Her for an exhibition at the New Art Centre Sculpture Park and Gallery. This image of "Ariadne in a sleeping bag" draws together many of his key concerns, including the paintings of early modernism and the complexity of sculptural forms, and ideas of authorship, identity and authenticity. In this engaging film, he discusses Her and a wide range of his earlier work. theEYE is an excellent introduction to contemporary artists and their works and provides an ideal resource for a wide range of audiences, including galleries, museums and colleges, as well as individual art-lover
Gavin Turk
No full textThe book illustrates 25 carefully selected artworks spanning Turk's career, from his seminal blue-plaque work, 'Cave', through his many signature-based artworks, egg sculptures, and waxworks - including 'Pop', one of the truly iconic works of recent British art - to his more recent bronze casts of sleeping bags and bin bags. Also included are lesser-known works, some of which are reproduced for the first time, including documentation of performance and installation works.
The interview with Turk focuses on the ideas behind his work: the nature of art itself, his use of popular celebrity and political imagery, and why it is that he makes art at all
The Mechanical Turk
No full textGavin Turk’s film The Mechanical Turk (2006), presented by the Gervasuti Foundation in collaboration with the Hotel Metropole is a site specific installation within the context of the hotel’s Byzantine, historical and cultural references. The film shows the artist impersonating Wolfgang von Kempelen’s famous automaton ‘The Turk’ (1769) which was capable of playing a game of chess against a human opponent. This ingeniously constructed mechanism was exhibited by its various owners and captivated audiences across Europe and America, until Edgar Allen Poe exposed it in the early 1820s as a hoax. The cabinet beneath the automaton was an elaborate hiding place for a dwarf chess master to secretly play the game. The influential cultural theorist Walter Benjamin compared the Mechanical Turk to a particular view of history, which doesn’t see through the illusions that conceal the true mechanisms of power and he related the automaton to Karl Marx’s concept of historical materialism
'Wittgenstein's Dream' by Gavin Turk
No full textThe celebrated philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), whose sister was incidentally a patient of Freud claimed that Freud’s views on the interpretation of dreams were completely mistaken. Gavin Turk’s project included a life-size waxwork sculpture of Wittgenstein contemplating an egg. Turk’s ghostly figure of Wittgenstein installed in the hallowed and highly charged domain of Freud’s study set up an intriguing conceptual dialogue between these two enlightened Viennese thinkers. Above Freud’s iconic couch Turk hung a large photograph of billowing smoke that relates to the human tendency to instinctively associate its patterns and forms with something familiar in the same way as we do with dream images. Turk also installed three neon language works ‘Id’ ,‘I’ and ‘Super Ego’on the staircase that relate to Freud’s paper published in 1923, an analytical study of the human psyche,which is of fundamental importance in the development of psychoanalysis. In the dining room he hung a photowork that explores the Narcissus myth, which inspired Freud. Turk echoed Freud’s iconic desk and chair by installing his own version in the first floor exhibition room. As an ironic contrast to Freud’s beloved antiquities, Turk arranged his own personal collection of intriguing, talismanic objects and keepsakes that relate to his artistic practice. The display was annotated with a museum style key describing each object. The exhibition opening included a performance with a Freud doppelgänger having fallen asleep at his own desk
Gavin Turk - History of Art
No full text‘History of Art’ brings together paintings and sculptures by Gavin Turk juxtaposed with a selection of works by modern masters which have been kindly loaned from private collections in Italy, the UK and Germany, including Turk’s own collection. Gavin Turk draws inspiration from and responds to the work of specific artists – Albers, Beuys, Boetti, Cesar, Duchamp, Dali, Fontana, Judd, Klein, Magritte, and Pollock – and also references Hirst’s more contemporary medicine cabinets.
The artist has played with the recycling of art history throughout his oeuvre. His responses to other artists’ often innovative works, play with the way these can be reduced to stylistic clichés or stereotypes that become their recognisable distinctive ‘trademarks’. He works with imagery and motifs, often combining two or three artist references in a single painting or sculpture. He reshapes these art historical clichés together with his own to create something new and different.
Turk’s six-panel image ‘Widower’ is inspired both by Duchamp’s ‘Fresh Widow’ (1920) and Magritte’s ‘The Key to Dreams’ (1930). The latter was used on the cover of John Berger’s influential book Ways of Seeing (1970), in which Berger maintained that our perception is governed by what we know and what we believe, rather than what is ‘real’. Turk has created a response to Berger’s book cover for his exhibition invitation as if to prompt questions about art and its relationship to thought and reality.
Like Duchamp, Turk makes puns and wordplays in his titles as a central element within his work. Adopting the principle of the readymade, he often uses discarded ‘found objects’, thereby transforming the valueless into the precious. He is also fascinated with the validating function of the artist’s signature as a means of bestowing both aesthetic and commercial value on the artwork, rather like a brand or logo.
Turk’s carefully considered appropriations or borrowings critique the notion of originality and our perception of the historic avant-garde. ‘History of Art’ raises issues about the ‘myth’ of the artist, the iconic work of art, and the ‘originality’ of its authorship and its subsequent market value.
Turk’s imaginative homages to other artists’ work are intended to provoke serious thought into deeper questions about identity and authenticity. They both reanimate and challenge the old avant-garde myths and re-instate the critiques of authorship proposed by Duchamp as well as artists who use appropriation, such as Sherrie Levine. He excavates the foundations of art history and questions how the appraisal, originality and commodity value of works of art affect their meaning
(Turk) (Must) (Do) (Better) A Critical Review of Wittgenstein’s Dream
No full textCan we safely dismiss Freudian psychoanalysis with the lancet of irony? Or does the attempt fail? Gavin Turk at the Freud Museum
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