Artworks2011Transit Disaster Beige
Transit Disaster Beige
Acrylic paint on canvas
175 x 217 cms
Disaster series painting featuring a Transit Van in black on beige in multiple print
Appropriations of appropriations, Turk’s Transit Disaster series re-cycles Warhol’s car crash paintings from the Pop Artist’s Death And Disaster series, which in turn were re-cycled from photographs of fatal accidents taken from newspapers. Except, rather than an American car, the vehicle in question in Turk’s work is the iconic white van, symbol of a certain white working class Britishness, now dying its own kind of slow death, as the UK moves into a post-industrial, multi-cultural era, where demand for them is beginning to diminish. Where Warhol’s “originals”, anesthetized violence through multiple reproductions in bright, saturated colours, so the Transit Disaster paintings become abstractions of abstractions, transforming horror into beauty and death into something striking and sexy as the deformed metal of the crashes become textures, patterns and shapes, with the notion of Britishness becoming the ultimate casualty.