Wood ‘n’ Melon
Painted bronze
20 x 38 x 20 cms
2001
A bronze cast of a melon, half painted in realist style with the skin surface of a classic watermelon, the other half blended into a briar wood paint pattern similar to that of an old fashioned pipe like that used by Magritte.
The is an alchemy piece. It is the transmutation of a melon into briar wood (traditionally used to make pipes) but then you realize that it is actually made of bronze. The layers of material meaning multiply, until you are no longer sure of what you are looking at.
The Artist has made many pieces of art inspired by the street. Cardboard boxes (‘Brillo’, 2002), bin bags in bronze (‘Bag’, 2001) and ‘Nomad’ (a figure in a sleeping bag cast in bronze). All these works are questioning value and status. The melon pieces are quirkier than that, watermelons having saucy, colloquial associations because of their size and succulence. But they are also a vegetable-like fruit often put on the floor outside shops because of their size. An urban boulder. The melon is not indigenous to this country and therefore represents the exotic: the unknown.
Exhibitions
- Copper Jubilee - The New Art Gallery Walsall, 2002
- Gavin Turk In The House - Sherborn House, 2003
- London Calling. Y(oung) B(ritish) A(rtists) Criss-Crossed - Kaare Bernsten, 2005
Essays
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Which Came First? - Rachel Newsome
SHOW
Which Came First? - Rachel Newsome
To begin at the end. In a sky-lit wood-panelled room inside the Royal College of Art mounted on an otherwise empty wall in an otherwise empty room, a blue ceramic English heritage plaque reads “Gavin Turk, Sculptor, worked here 1989 – 1991”. A commemoration of a life, it marks the presence of the artist with the most powerful and evocative of the tools that might be at his disposal - his absence. The curtain has fallen. The titles are rolling. Gavin Turk has left the stage. Death as performance. While the absence of the artist, we make the art.
The artist is no more and all that is left for the audience in this empty white space is to reverently imagine the work which once filled this space, while apprehending that the emptiness is the work. And so material object of the plaque frames the space and the art work frames the artist, the one somehow preceding the other in an elliptical sleight of hand, as the end frames the beginning. The artist is dead. Long live art!
To kill yourself off before your career has even begun is a particularly punk thing to do (never -
Trompe L'oeil - Rikke Hansen
SHOW
Trompe L'oeil - Rikke Hansen
Like the carefully staged crime scene, trompe l’œil tricks the viewer through the arrangement of misleading appearances and false clues. Literally meaning ‘cheat the eye’, the art technique involves the realistic depiction of phenomena to create optical illusions, often turning flat surfaces into seemingly three-dimensional objects. Trompe l’œil art does not belong to a particular ism or medium but slips in and out of focus through the ages, depending on dominant regimes of representation.
Although the term was not coined until the early 1800s, the genre can be traced back to Greek and Roman times. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder writes of a rivalry in ancient Greece between the painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius, both accomplished in this particular art. Largely forgotten during the Middle Ages, the technique was given a new lease of life by the Italian Renaissance and the era’s advanced understanding of perspective, while painters of the Baroque era applied it to the then increasingly popular genre of still life. Artists of the Modern period, however, made limited use of trompe l’œil, as works no longer strived towards illusion or imitation but were made to investigate the grounds for art’s own existence. Nonetheless, a few