Exhibitions2011Before the World Was Round

The title of the show was taken from an image at its centre, a map of the world traced in the lines and patterns of peeling paint as if on a cell wall. The map, created from human refuse, navigates a society of supermarket shoppers through the detritus of their own consumerism. The show played with the transcription of dimension, of surface on form and form on surface.

The exhibition presented works produced between 2003 and 2011 including Transit Disaster Red (2010), displaying the working-class symbol of the white van through Warhol’s gaze, and Missile (2010), one of Turk’s signature painted bronze trompe l’oeils of a brick and the artefact of a revolution that never occurred.

The detritus of the street was explored through Pavement (2008), a section of broken concrete pavement immortalised as painted bronze, and The Beach (2010), a brass rubbing of a London pavement playing the role of sandy shores. Also on display were Turk’s Fresh Window series (2011), a droll take on Duchamp’s leather-bound sculptures, obscuring the rhetorical transparency of the window’s form with the opaque reality of the painting.

An exquisite sculptural series including a small matchbox, an apple core and a toilet roll were on display, formed from the clay clodding of England’s ‘green and pleasant land’. The basic material formed the substance of a room filled with the most violent of Turks works, artefacts of a series of performances in which the artist invited audiences to resculpt slip clay casts of his head. The resulting images are bashed and torn and disfigured, revealing the innate desires of a public to destroy and corrupt rather than decorate and embellish.