Exhibitions2005Ha ha ha!

Ha ha ha! was a solo show by Gavin Turk at Almine Rech, Paris, featuring some of the artist’s iconic sculptural and painted bronze works including the self-memorialising Gentleman Jim (2005), Inside Outside (2006) and Painted bronze III (2004/2006).

Turk references Duchamp, the great artist of nihilism. His urinal-as-art, Fountain (1917), took a formerly banal and despised object and transformed it into art through the artist’s signature. The iconic artist used honed craft techniques and materials to produce his tompe l’oeils of sugar cubes. Almost a century later Turk emulated this work, questioning what is the valued object and what is the shadow recast in terms of society’s rejects: the homeless, the bin bag, cigarette butts.