Gavin Turk

Gavin Turk is a controversial contemporary artist whose installations and sculptures take an ironic approach in addressing issues of authorship, authenticity and identity. As a keen observer, the artist deals with the ‘aesthetic transubstantiation’ of everyday objects/products in an attempt to make his audience reconsider things they already know or have perhaps overlooked.

In the way same way Turk plays with the concept of objects, he also refers to his own name as a ‘found object’, treating it like a material and making it a fundamental, ever-present part of his work. Whether transposing his face onto a waxwork figure of Sid Vicious in the pose of Andy Warhol’s Elvis Presley (Pop, 1993), or creating a print of the Turkish eye (Turkish Eye, 2018) as a play on his own name, Turk looks to sidestep labels and, as he once said: “move away from anything that would be a quintessentially Gavin Turk piece”.