Exhibitions2006Last Year in Eggenberg (The Paradise Show)

Last Year in Eggenberg was an exhibition of works by Gavin Turk at Schloss Eggenberg which included the life-size automaton, Gentleman Jim, and performances of Waiting for Gavo.

Gentleman Jim took his place as another “Hall of Fame” figure in Turk’s artistic oeuvre joining icons such as Che Guevara, Sid Vicious, Elvis Presley and Joseph Beuys. Turk’s life-sized, grotesque self-portraits presented to audiences as metaphors for the absurdity of reality and one’s own existence.

The same absurdity was reflected in, Waiting for Gavo, a puppet show adapted from Samuel Beckett’s celebrated Waiting for Godot by Turk. The hand-made puppets are no less than additional Gavin Turk self-portraits, incorporating figures from art history such as Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol.

The show presented a twisted vision of paradise complemented by “lost” and forgotten objects: a crushed polystyrene cup with the dregs of tea; a used match, discarded and worthless. Turk brought these objects back to life and on them confers immortality. Equivocal symbols of civilisation sublimated and refined by Turk, cast in bronze, before being presented back to the audience stripped of deprived of their material value by their outwards appearance of discarded waste.