GAVIN TURK’S BIN BAG MOTIF WAS ORIGINALLY CREATED IN THE LATE 90S FOLLOWING ON FROM A SERIES OF WORK, WHERE FILLED BIN BAGS WERE CAST IN BRONZE AND PAINTED TO LOOK REAL, IMMEDIATELY ENGAGING WITH THEMES OF VALUE AND AUTHENTICITY. TURK NOW OFFERS THE OVERLOOKED AND DISCARDED, AS PROVOCATIVELY CONTEMPORARY PROPOSALS. PRESENTED HERE AS SINGLE PANELS OR DIPTYCHS, REMINISCENT OF MICHELANGELO PISTOLETTO'S MIRROR WORKS.

Green and Pink with Rubbish Bag

Acrylic paint and diamond dust on canvas

Rubbish

Consume

Silkscreen

GAVIN TURK’S BIN BAG MOTIF WAS ORIGINALLY CREATED IN THE LATE 90S FOLLOWING ON FROM A SERIES OF WORK, WHERE FILLED BIN BAGS WERE CAST IN BRONZE AND PAINTED TO LOOK REAL, IMMEDIATELY ENGAGING WITH THEMES OF VALUE AND AUTHENTICITY. TURK NOW OFFERS THE OVERLOOKED AND DISCARDED, AS PROVOCATIVELY CONTEMPORARY PROPOSALS. PRESENTED HERE AS SINGLE PANELS OR DIPTYCHS, REMINISCENT OF MICHELANGELO PISTOLETTO'S MIRROR WORKS.

Spazzatura di Pistoletto 

Screenprint on mirror finish stainless steel

Bin Bags

Transit Disaster Black on Pink

Silkscreen ink on Heritage paper

Transit Disaster Red on Yellow

Transit

Warhol

Pistoletto's Trash

Dinosaur Transit Disaster Silver

Turkish Eye (blue and turquoise) signed limited edition silkscreen print by Gavin Turk. Produced as part of the live printmaking demonstration at the London Original Print Fair 2018 and as such each edition will vary.

A play on his own name, the print features the Nazar Boncuğu or 'turkish eye', widely displayed in homes, shops and businesses across Turkey to ward off evil and provide protection to the wearer in all aspects of their life. A prevalent part of Turkish culture, the turkish eye is believed to possess magic powers to protect you or bring you good luck. Nazar are often given as gifts to friends who have just had a baby, or moved into a new house, though sometimes they are given to foreigners as protection during their stay in Turkey. The Nazar symbol can also be traced back to the Ancient Egyptians, where the Eye of Horus was a symbol of protection, royal power and good health. It is said that when an evil eye cracks, it has done its job of protecting you. Reflecting the magical powers of the turkish eye, this print is available in an edition size of 29 prints, a primary number and considered magic in many cultures.

CCA Galleries and Worton Hall Studios were delighted to be joined by Turk over the bank holiday weekend at the London Original Print Fair 2018, where he produced the edition in a stimulating live printmaking demonstration at the fair's own Printmaking Festival.

Published by Coriander Studio.

Turkish Eye (blue and turquoise)

Acrylic silkscreen on paper

Eyes

Turkish Eye (blue and turquoise) signed limited edition silkscreen print by Gavin Turk. Produced as part of the live printmaking demonstration at the London Original Print Fair 2018 and as such each edition will vary. A play on his own name, the print features the Nazar Boncuğu or 'turkish eye', widely displayed in homes, shops and businesses across Turkey to ward off evil and provide protection to the wearer in all aspects of their life. A prevalent part of Turkish culture, the turkish eye is believed to possess magic powers to protect you or bring you good luck.

Transit Disaster Hoodie (Red Portrait)

Silkscreen ink and metallic paint on canvas

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 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. 

Warhol’s “originals”, anaesthetised 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.

Transit Disaster Hoodie Silver

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 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. Warhol’s “originals”, anaesthetised 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.

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 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.

Large Transit Disaster Carcass

Marat Linen

Silkscreen ink on linen

Masks

Self-Portrait

Faces

Installation info: Surface very susceptible to marking.  Handle only with gloves and take great care not to touch.  To dust use compressed air or a new microfibre cloth and press only lightly.A black painting hangs on a wall, typed across its centre are the words ‘A Vision’ also in black; the words are readable through a radiating exterior white glow which gives the impression of the words being made of a masked light.The words are written in American Typewriter typeface, famed for its use in the ‘I ♥ NY’ logo and reminiscent of text works by Joseph Kosuth. This illuminated ‘sign’ designates the act of being able to see and read while simultaneously being something seen and read. ‘A Vision’ is the context and the text. Ultimately the words refer to a category that represents a kind of future, a dream like state in which destiny or a distant reality is imagined.Gavin Turk

A Vision

Installation info: Surface very susceptible to marking. Handle only with gloves and take great care not to touch. To dust use compressed air or a new microfibre cloth and press only lightly.A black painting hangs on a wall, typed across its centre are the words ‘A Vision’ also in black; the words are readable through a radiating exterior white glow which gives the impression of the words being made of a masked light.The words are written in American Typewriter typeface, famed for its use in the ‘I ♥ NY’ logo and reminiscent of text works by Joseph Kosuth. This illuminated ‘sign’ designates the act of being able to see and read while simultaneously being something seen and read. ‘A Vision’ is the context and the text. Ultimately the words refer to a category that represents a kind of future, a dream like state in which destiny or a distant reality is imagined.Gavin Turk

Installation info: Surface very susceptible to marking. Handle only with gloves and take great care not to touch. To dust use compressed air or a new microfibre cloth and press only lightly. A black painting hangs on a wall, typed across its centre are the words ‘A Vision’ also in black; the words are readable through a radiating exterior white glow which gives the impression of the words being made of a masked light. The words are written in American Typewriter typeface, famed for its use in the ‘I ♥ NY’ logo and reminiscent of text works by Joseph Kosuth.

Untitled Fright Wig Piss Painting

Icons

Piss

Waste

GT Hens Eggs

On the occasion of  the 55th Venice Biennale Turk created a site specific project for the Gervasuti Foundation.   The installation comprised of a work based on the artist’s ongoing Transit Disaster series. The title is a pun on ‘van’ and ‘vernacular‘, a metaphor implying the social connotations that the iconic white Ford van of the ‘90s represents in British society and a paradoxical play on the Venetian urban context, a city without roads.  Vanacular reconfigures a language of identity between that which is considered an accident of fate and that which is invested with intent, both in art and in life.Turk often recycles famous art historical imagery in order to make contemporary societal correlations. Vanacular revives the classic pop-art technique of silk-screen-on-canvas while referencing the works of its most celebrated exponents Andy Warhol and Robert Raushenberg with his 18 metre long Currents (1970). Inspired by Warhol’s famous Death And Disaster series (1962-3), which were derived from photographs of fatal car accidents taken from newspapers, Turk’s Vanacular comprises of a 27 metre long canvas with a selection of sourced images of crashed and/or burnt-out Ford Transit vans.  The expressive shapes of the distorted metal, every scratch as if charged with meaning, also allude to the underlying social tensions that led to the 2011 London riots which some of these images come from.  The repeated still images silk-screened in a ‘Warhol style’ range of colour combinations produce an animated effect as if to suggest a disaster movie. The orchestration of colours enhances this sense of motion which in turn effects a transformation or change from the stasis of the crashed vans into a new energy or lifeforce. The Transit Disaster series is not merely a pastiche of Warhol’s famous car crash paintings since Turk replaces the American car with an image of a white transit van, a symbol of a disappearing era of working class Britain. Vanacular also relates, albeit indirectly, to the term ‘Fordism’, the notion of a modern economic and social system based on an assembly line of mass production for a mass market. Turk’s Vanacular represents a visual manifestation of urban unrest, which through continuous clashes and disasters is heading towards a materialistic mutation.

Vanacular

Silikscreen on canvas

On the occasion of the 55th Venice Biennale Turk created a site specific project for the Gervasuti Foundation. The installation comprised of a work based on the artist’s ongoing Transit Disaster series. The title is a pun on ‘van’ and ‘vernacular‘, a metaphor implying the social connotations that the iconic white Ford van of the ‘90s represents in British society and a paradoxical play on the Venetian urban context, a city without roads. Vanacular reconfigures a language of identity between that which is considered an accident of fate and that which is invested with intent, both in art and in life.Turk often recycles famous art historical imagery in order to make contemporary societal correlations. Vanacular revives the classic pop-art technique of silk-screen-on-canvas while referencing the works of its most celebrated exponents Andy Warhol and Robert Raushenberg with his 18 metre long Currents (1970). Inspired by Warhol’s famous Death And Disaster series (1962-3), which were derived from photographs of fatal car accidents taken from newspapers, Turk’s Vanacular comprises of a 27 metre long canvas with a selection of sourced images of crashed and/or burnt-out Ford Transit vans. The expressive shapes of the distorted metal, every scratch as if charged with meaning, also allude to the underlying social tensions that led to the 2011 London riots which some of these images come from. The repeated still images silk-screened in a ‘Warhol style’ range of colour combinations produce an animated effect as if to suggest a disaster movie. The orchestration of colours enhances this sense of motion which in turn effects a transformation or change from the stasis of the crashed vans into a new energy or lifeforce. The Transit Disaster series is not merely a pastiche of Warhol’s famous car crash paintings since Turk replaces the American car with an image of a white transit van, a symbol of a disappearing era of working class Britain. Vanacular also relates, albeit indirectly, to the term ‘Fordism’, the notion of a modern economic and social system based on an assembly line of mass production for a mass market. Turk’s Vanacular represents a visual manifestation of urban unrest, which through continuous clashes and disasters is heading towards a materialistic mutation.

Vehicles

On the occasion of the 55th Venice Biennale Turk created a site specific project for the Gervasuti Foundation. The installation comprised of a work based on the artist’s ongoing Transit Disaster series. The title is a pun on ‘van’ and ‘vernacular‘, a metaphor implying the social connotations that the iconic white Ford van of the ‘90s represents in British society and a paradoxical play on the Venetian urban context, a city without roads.

Double Gold Pop Gun

Silkscreen on gold leaf on paper

In the early 1960s, Michelangelo Pistoletto made his first mirror paintings. They weren’t really mirrors, as they were done on large sheets of polished steel, and they weren’t really paintings, because the ‘floating’ figures they depicted were photographs printed on tissue (and later silk screens) applied to the metal surfaces. What they were – and still are – was platforms which spectacularly embodied the world (and all its artifice) through their reflection. The same could be said for Gavin Turk;  who not only appropriates historical artists’ works, but their entire mythologies, for his own-brand celebrity, refracting art world legends – such as Pistoletto’s mirror paintings – for democratized progress and use.  Substituting Pistoletto’s casually posed models with his own trademark bin bag – a punk-ethos anti-logo Turk’s previously reproduced in prints and stickers, monumentalised in trompe l’œuil bronze sculptures – Turk literally overlays Pistoletto’s legacy with his own. Maths being a favoured systematology in Arte Povera’s metaphysical quest, Turk revitalizes and trumps Pistoletto’s epitomized art/life merger with the end-game logic of +1. Mirror + bin bag, Pistoletto + Turk = art’s tautological lineage, performative re-enactment, and a certain Darwinian progress of artistic ego. But most importantly +1, by its very essence, is infinite.For Pistoletto, his ‘paintings’ functioned something like real-time theatre: his static figures wittily claiming the reflected gallery space as a stage, and viewers as veritas subjects; his mirrors less objects than mystical portals to a parallel present. Humorously titled Pistoletto’s (Rubbish/Waste/Bag), Turk’s tributes reflect the now as a bridge between past and future – as both consequence and prescience – transposing the gallery to a scene of hyper-consumerist apocalypse, where garbage becomes elevated to masterpiece in the hallowed white cube, and artworks and viewers luxuriantly bask in their own expenditure. Turk’s bin bag motif was originally created in the late 1990s as part of a series of work engaging with themes of homelessness. Transferred to Pistoletto’s visionary 1960s framework – heavy mirror and inky decal today seem a quaintly Luddite attempt at virtuality – Turk offers the overlooked and discarded, redundant and obsolete, as provocatively contemporary proposals. Presented as a single panel, Pistoletto’s Rubbish (2013), simulates the format of an altarpiece: a site of reverence, of stark confrontation, of our cultural values, fetishizations, desires, and excesses; of the world – featuring ourselves, via brand-Turk, as transients in the spectacle.

Pistoletto's Rubbish

In the early 1960s, Michelangelo Pistoletto made his first mirror paintings. They weren’t really mirrors, as they were done on large sheets of polished steel, and they weren’t really paintings, because the ‘floating’ figures they depicted were photographs printed on tissue (and later silk screens) applied to the metal surfaces. What they were – and still are – was platforms which spectacularly embodied the world (and all its artifice) through their reflection. The same could be said for Gavin Turk; who not only appropriates historical artists’ works, but their entire mythologies, for his own-brand celebrity, refracting art world legends – such as Pistoletto’s mirror paintings – for democratized progress and use. Substituting Pistoletto’s casually posed models with his own trademark bin bag – a punk-ethos anti-logo Turk’s previously reproduced in prints and stickers, monumentalised in trompe l’œuil bronze sculptures – Turk literally overlays Pistoletto’s legacy with his own. Maths being a favoured systematology in Arte Povera’s metaphysical quest, Turk revitalizes and trumps Pistoletto’s epitomized art/life merger with the end-game logic of +1. Mirror + bin bag, Pistoletto + Turk = art’s tautological lineage, performative re-enactment, and a certain Darwinian progress of artistic ego. But most importantly +1, by its very essence, is infinite.For Pistoletto, his ‘paintings’ functioned something like real-time theatre: his static figures wittily claiming the reflected gallery space as a stage, and viewers as veritas subjects; his mirrors less objects than mystical portals to a parallel present. Humorously titled Pistoletto’s (Rubbish/Waste/Bag), Turk’s tributes reflect the now as a bridge between past and future – as both consequence and prescience – transposing the gallery to a scene of hyper-consumerist apocalypse, where garbage becomes elevated to masterpiece in the hallowed white cube, and artworks and viewers luxuriantly bask in their own expenditure. Turk’s bin bag motif was originally created in the late 1990s as part of a series of work engaging with themes of homelessness. Transferred to Pistoletto’s visionary 1960s framework – heavy mirror and inky decal today seem a quaintly Luddite attempt at virtuality – Turk offers the overlooked and discarded, redundant and obsolete, as provocatively contemporary proposals. Presented as a single panel, Pistoletto’s Rubbish (2013), simulates the format of an altarpiece: a site of reverence, of stark confrontation, of our cultural values, fetishizations, desires, and excesses; of the world – featuring ourselves, via brand-Turk, as transients in the spectacle.

Mirrors

In the early 1960s, Michelangelo Pistoletto made his first mirror paintings. They weren’t really mirrors, as they were done on large sheets of polished steel, and they weren’t really paintings, because the ‘floating’ figures they depicted were photographs printed on tissue (and later silk screens) applied to the metal surfaces. What they were – and still are – was platforms which spectacularly embodied the world (and all its artifice) through their reflection.

Double Silver Pop Gun

Silkscreen on palladium leaf on paper

Ghost Pop

Sid Vicious

Outsider

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.

Transit Disaster Arcade Green

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.

Transit Disaster Burnt Out White

Installation info: Hang on wall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.

Transit Disaster Dinosaurs Lilac

Installation info: Hang on wallAppropriations 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.

Installation info: Hang on wall 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.