The title, "Sayonara," suggests a farewell, a bittersweet adieu to the year just past. Turk invites us to bid farewell to the tumultuous year 2022, allowing us to reflect on the collective experiences that shaped the world during that time. Through his artistic lens, the artist captures the essence of an entire year in a haunting and symbolic manner.

Sayonara

Oil and acrylic on canvas

The title, "Sayonara," suggests a farewell, a bittersweet adieu to the year just past. Turk invites us to bid farewell to the tumultuous year 2022, allowing us to reflect on the collective experiences that shaped the world during that time. Through his artistic lens, the artist captures the essence of an entire year in a haunting and symbolic manner.

Fate

Signs

The End

Painting

Disembodied from any room, structure or building, this ‘larger than life’ painted bronze door, is freestanding, open at 45°’s to the frame. This internal wooden door now placed in the park has different colours painted on each side, the door shows signs of age and wear which are painted onto its surface. Its giant bronze door handle and keyhole seem to shrink the viewer. ‘I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing -but of a breathing without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning.’ - Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception This work invokes Magritte’s painting ‘La Victoire’ and the title references Luis Bunuel’s surreal film of the same name. It is a playful surrealist public artwork that the audience enjoys interacting with as a gateway to their imagination. L’Âge d’Or teases the audience to question notions of home, security, architecture and also the bolder concepts of inside and outside. The work can also be seen in the context of Marcel Duchamp’s door in rue Larrey and Jasper Johns’ painted bronze Ballentine beer cans. Question: When is a door not a door? Answer: When it’s ajar

L'Âge d'Or (Green & Red)

Painted bronze

Disembodied from any room, structure or building, this ‘larger than life’ painted bronze door, is freestanding, open at 45°’s to the frame. This internal wooden door now placed in the park has different colours painted on each side, the door shows signs of age and wear which are painted onto its surface. Its giant bronze door handle and keyhole seem to shrink the viewer. ‘I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing -but of a breathing without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning.’ - Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception This work invokes Magritte’s painting ‘La Victoire’ and the title references Luis Bunuel’s surreal film of the same name. It is a playful surrealist public artwork that the audience enjoys interacting with as a gateway to their imagination. L’Âge d’Or teases the audience to question notions of home, security, architecture and also the bolder concepts of inside and outside. The work can also be seen in the context of Marcel Duchamp’s door in rue Larrey and Jasper Johns’ painted bronze Ballentine beer cans. Question: When is a door not a door? Answer: When it’s ajar

Doors

Duchamp

Infinity

Public Sculpture

Disembodied from any room, structure or building, this ‘larger than life’ painted bronze door, is freestanding, open at 45°’s to the frame. This internal wooden door now placed in the park has different colours painted on each side, the door shows signs of age and wear which are painted onto its surface. Its giant bronze door handle and keyhole seem to shrink the viewer.

Rotor Rings

Glass and mixed media

12 rotating rings (6 front, 6 back) using the traditional Olympic colours in the style of Duchamp's Rotor Reliefs

Automaton

Sculpture

Installation info: Wall mounted with clear plastic spacers and nickel wire and with three plugsAs a direct reference to the painting ‘La Victoire’ by Rene Magritte. Port is a surreal gateway: a spiritual journey through the imagination.  It is a key to unlocking ideas of the infinite as mused on by Aldous Huxley quoting Blake. "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."	It simultaneously references Duchamp earlier work ‘11 Rue Larrey’ the door that is never open or shut.

Port (Blue)

Blue neon mounted on a black wall

Installation info: Wall mounted with clear plastic spacers and nickel wire and with three plugsAs a direct reference to the painting ‘La Victoire’ by Rene Magritte. Port is a surreal gateway: a spiritual journey through the imagination. It is a key to unlocking ideas of the infinite as mused on by Aldous Huxley quoting Blake. "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."	It simultaneously references Duchamp earlier work ‘11 Rue Larrey’ the door that is never open or shut.

Illusion

Installation info: Wall mounted with clear plastic spacers and nickel wire and with three plugs As a direct reference to the painting ‘La Victoire’ by Rene Magritte. Port is a surreal gateway: a spiritual journey through the imagination. It is a key to unlocking ideas of the infinite as mused on by Aldous Huxley quoting Blake. "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." It simultaneously references Duchamp earlier work ‘11 Rue Larrey’ the door that is never open or shut.

Installation info: - Ensure table is resting on level surface. - Ensure control unit is plugged in to suitable power transformer. Both motors run 0-30V. - Ensure leads from both motors are inserted into control unit to ensure clockwise rotation of coin and clockwise movement of the spinning coin. - Turn switches A,B &amp; C off. - Use the small circular magnet found on top of the power unit to locate the centre of the magnetic force by releasing the magnet on top of the table on the area the coin will spin. The small circular magnet should rest in the centre. - Carefully remove the small circular magnet and replace with a 2p coin. The preferable coin is labelled. The coin will naturally sit perpendicularly to the small circular magnet at its most magnetised. - Turn two dials to left of dial D to extreme right. Turn dial D to extreme left. - Turn on switch A and switch B. Very slowly turn dial D towards line marked on unit. The coin will spin on the spot if it has been located in the centre of the magnetic force correctly. - Once the coin is spinning on the spot, turn the dials to the left of E to the extreme right, and dial E to the extreme left. Turn switch C on. Slowly turn dial E towards line marked on unit. Still spinning, the coin will move around the table. - To turn machine off, turn off switch C, the switch B, the switch A. Repeat above procedure restart machine. An eternally spinning two pence coin on a table top.

50/50

Kitchen table, coin and motor

An eternally spinning two pence coin on a table top.

Installation info: - Ensure table is resting on level surface. - Ensure control unit is plugged in to suitable power transformer. Both motors run 0-30V. - Ensure leads from both motors are inserted into control unit to ensure clockwise rotation of coin and clockwise movement of the spinning coin. - Turn switches A,B & C off. - Use the small circular magnet found on top of the power unit to locate the centre of the magnetic force by releasing the magnet on top of the table on the area the coin will spin. The small circular magnet should rest in the centre.

A knife slowly spinning on a yellow formica table with an electric motor. Gavin Turk in conversation with Louisa Buck, December 2006: Louisa Buck: The Negotiation of Purpose is a piece in which a knife spins round and round on a tabletop as in the game of chance. But in this case a hidden motor means that the knife keeps on turning and never stops. The implication seems to be that in this work there is no single static moment of intent or decision, the situation remains endlessly open ended. Determined purpose is cancelled out by perpetual motion: nobody is telling you what to do. Gavin Turk: The purpose is the state of negotiation, I guess. For me it was a Dada or Surrealist title for a kind of machine. A metaphor of a modernity that never quite arrived, it just became something else, it turned into what we have now. Louisa Buck: Underpinning much of modernism was the belief that truths would be arrived at and absolutes reached, whereas the present seems better expressed by this functionally dysfunctional machine that refuses a single, certain state. Or put in another way indecision is left in suspended animation. Gavin Turk: I saw this table with the knife on it as a reference to a ‘still life’ with the direction of the knife, its angle to the picture plane as its key compositional element. But at the same time because it is moving all the time. The audience gets a kind of multi perspective on the object in a cubistic way. There’s also the cliché of a revolving plinth with a sculpture on it, maybe it’s a television thing…

The Negotiation of Purpose

Kitchen table, knife and motor

A knife slowly spinning on a yellow formica table with an electric motor.Gavin Turk in conversation with Louisa Buck, December 2006: Louisa Buck: The Negotiation of Purpose is a piece in which a knife spins round and round on a tabletop as in the game of chance. But in this case a hidden motor means that the knife keeps on turning and never stops. The implication seems to be that in this work there is no single static moment of intent or decision, the situation remains endlessly open ended. Determined purpose is cancelled out by perpetual motion: nobody is telling you what to do. Gavin Turk: The purpose is the state of negotiation, I guess. For me it was a Dada or Surrealist title for a kind of machine. A metaphor of a modernity that never quite arrived, it just became something else, it turned into what we have now. Louisa Buck: Underpinning much of modernism was the belief that truths would be arrived at and absolutes reached, whereas the present seems better expressed by this functionally dysfunctional machine that refuses a single, certain state. Or put in another way indecision is left in suspended animation. Gavin Turk: I saw this table with the knife on it as a reference to a ‘still life’ with the direction of the knife, its angle to the picture plane as its key compositional element. But at the same time because it is moving all the time. The audience gets a kind of multi perspective on the object in a cubistic way. There’s also the cliché of a revolving plinth with a sculpture on it, maybe it’s a television thing…

A knife slowly spinning on a yellow formica table with an electric motor. Gavin Turk in conversation with Louisa Buck, December 2006: Louisa Buck: The Negotiation of Purpose is a piece in which a knife spins round and round on a tabletop as in the game of chance. But in this case a hidden motor means that the knife keeps on turning and never stops. The implication seems to be that in this work there is no single static moment of intent or decision, the situation remains endlessly open ended. Determined purpose is cancelled out by perpetual motion: nobody is telling you what to do.

An old white table with a metal frame with a glass Perrier bottle spinning on its surface.

En Plein Air

studio table, glass bottle and motor

En Plein Air (1994) consists of a well-used white table with a glass Perrier bottle slowly spinning on its surface. This mechanical artwork is one of a series musing on decision-making. Air in an empty bottle, that once contained mineral water, revolving deliberately on a table – like a ouija board. But the bottle never stops spinning, or reaching its decision, caught in suspended animation.

Vessels

Chance

An old white table with a metal frame with a glass Perrier bottle spinning on its surface.

A study drawing on blueprint paper for the piece ‘Cave’.

pencil on blueprint

A study drawing on blueprint paper for the piece ‘Cave’.

Authorship

Work on paper

Study for Cave

The original blue plaque from 'Cave' installation encased in a Beuysian vitrine made with boards from the room walls when first shown.

In the summer of 1991 for his graduation show from the Royal College of Art, the artist exhibited a blue Heritage plaque in an otherwise empty studio which commemorated his own presence as a sculptor.

The title Cave refers to an allegorical picture of Plato, which describes a model of perception. A group of prisoners have been chained in a cave since childhood with no experience of reality other than the flickering shadows cast by the people and things moving along a path in front of a fire situated behind them. In the plaque, the artist was represented by a retrospective view of his life.

Relic (Cave)

original plaque from Cave installation in vitrine

The original blue plaque from 'Cave' installation encased in a Beuysian vitrine made with boards from the room walls when first shown. In the summer of 1991 for his graduation show from the Royal College of Art, the artist exhibited a blue Heritage plaque in an otherwise empty studio which commemorated his own presence as a sculptor. The title Cave refers to an allegorical picture of Plato, which describes a model of perception. A group of prisoners have been chained in a cave since childhood with no experience of reality other than the flickering shadows cast by the people and things moving along a path in front of a fire situated behind them. In the plaque, the artist was represented by a retrospective view of his life.

Celebrity

Death

The original blue plaque from 'Cave' installation encased in a Beuysian vitrine made with boards from the room walls when first shown. In the summer of 1991 for his graduation show from the Royal College of Art, the artist exhibited a blue Heritage plaque in an otherwise empty studio which commemorated his own presence as a sculptor.

An ‘historical blue plaque’ to commemorate work done by the artist during his time at the Royal College of Art. 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. All that is left behind of the artist is a memorial to an implied body of work, and by extension, an implied life and worth, while the title, after Plato’s famous allegory, tells of a hidden reality we can neither see nor know. In an unexpected twist to the tale, Cave has additionally become infamous as the piece of work that "won" Turk a fail for his Masters which he had been studying for at the Royal College of Art. Ironically, it has gone on to become regarded as one of Turk's most iconic pieces.

Cave

Ceramic plaque in room

An ‘historical blue plaque’ to commemorate work done by the artist during his time at the Royal College of Art. 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. All that is left behind of the artist is a memorial to an implied body of work, and by extension, an implied life and worth, while the title, after Plato’s famous allegory, tells of a hidden reality we can neither see nor know. In an unexpected twist to the tale, Cave has additionally become infamous as the piece of work that "won" Turk a fail for his Masters which he had been studying for at the Royal College of Art. Ironically, it has gone on to become regarded as one of Turk's most iconic pieces.

Installation

An ‘historical blue plaque’ to commemorate work done by the artist during his time at the Royal College of Art. 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.

A ceramic replica of the original ‘historical blue plaque’ which was shown by the Artist in his degree show at the Royal College of Art.

Cavey

Ceramic plaque

A ceramic replica of the original ‘historical blue plaque’ which was shown by the Artist in his degree show at the Royal College of Art.