Exhibitions2012En Face (Vienna)

In 2012, Gavin Turk’s En Face series travelled to Vienna to feature at Galerie Krinzinger. The series consisted of a collection of 72 clay busts created in an interactive performance that took place at the artist’s London studio in April of 2010.

For The Bust Party, as it was known, Turk invited a group of people to manipulate the still wet clay of the busts in order to transform them into Surrealist “Exquisite Corpse.” In doing so, the artist had folded the public into the creative process, giving them the chance to add their own mark to a work in process.

The result was En Face, a title derived from French which Turk used to create a play on words describing a situation in which the viewer is confronted with a work of art and is capable of extracting and re-printing his or her own personal mark directly onto it.

The exhibition questioned the role of art, artists and its viewers. Turk’s intention was to suggest the idea of art as authorless, the result of a collaborative effort by a group of people whose involvement was – in this case - not just limited to the interpretative task of looking at the work.

Also notable are the titles that Turk had given to each of the busts. These were all anagrams of his own name, again, commenting on the value of authorship and identity. These titles included Raving Kut, Gavring Tuk, and Gun Irk Vat (all 2010)