Exhibitions2007Me as Him

In Me As Him, Gavin Turk turned his gaze towards the most celebrated and celebrity-obsessed figure in contemporary art. The final self-portraits of Andy Warhol, exhibited in London in 1986, provided the visual template for Turk to appropriate in a new suite of screen-printed canvases on the subject of originality and the marketable identity of the artist – the artist in question being both Warhol and Turk.

Gavin Turk has fashioned for himself a career on the subject of fame, the myth of authorship and what it is to be an artist. Like a sophisticated ‘tribute’ band, he has replayed Art’s Greatest Hits in homage to the ‘creative personality’ where invention, endlessly refashioned and imitated has become cliché.

With society’s infatuation with the idea of fame for fame’s sake, it was fitting that Turk should come to take on ‘Andy’, staring out of the master’s final likeness, the camouflage patterned ‘fright-wig’ paintings premiered at Anthony d’Offay’s gallery in London, 1986, just months before the artist’s death.

Warhol’s self-portraits replay elements the artist had ‘copy-righted’ before; a personal way of doing things that has become cliché in the hands of those paying tribute to the Factory style. Taking up residence within the Master’s image, Turk enacted a sumptuous, deluxe re-making and re-layering which reversed the intended purpose by refashioning the cliché into something genuinely ‘artificial’ and, therefore, daringly ‘original’.

The solo exhibition included a performance on July 16th where one hundred artists, curators and writers were invited to the gallery to urinate on four canvases to create oxidisation-, or, piss-paintings.