Exhibitions2012Transit Disaster

Presented by Paul Stolper Gallery, Transit Disaster was a series of 20 unique silkscreen prints by Turk, depicting two repeated images of a single transit van. Each printed in a different colour the installation mimics Warhol’s group of Shadow paintings (1979) with its hypnotic sequence of colour and image.

Just as Warhol’s car crash paintings from his ‘Death and Disaster’ series (1962 – 1963) anesthetised violence through multiple reproductions in bright, saturated colours, so to do Turk’s ‘Transit Disaster’ series become abstractions of abstractions, transforming horror into beauty and death into something striking and alluring, as the deformed metal of the crashes becomes textures, patterns and shapes.

However, the series is more than simply a contemporary re-cycling of Warhol’s paintings, by replacing the American car with an image of a transit van, a symbol of a certain burnt-out, both literally and symbolically, working class Britain, Turk incorporates ideas of social decline into Warhol’s glamorous oeuvre.