Gavin Turk at Goodman Gallery, Cape Town (press release) (2009-10)
artdesigncafé | café library | Published 5 January 2010
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Gavin Turk. Camouflage fright wig orange and grey, (2006). Silkscreen on canvas, 100 x 100 cm.
Gavin Turk: The Mirror stage
Goodman Gallery Cape TownExhibition opens Saturday 19 December at 10am until 16 January 2010
Goodman Gallery Cape Town proudly presents the first solo exhibition in South Africa by internationally acclaimed artist Gavin Turk.
Gavin Turk’s installations and sculptures deal with issues of authorship, authenticity and identity. Concerned with the “myth” of the artist and the “authorship” of a work, Turk’s engagement with this modernist, avant-garde debate stretches back to the ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp. In the early 1990s Turk explored issues of authorship and identity by making a number of works based on his own signature that comment on the value that the artist’s name confers on a work. He has also made a number of photographic and sculptural self-portraits that often involve some degree of disguise. One of his best-known sculptures, Pop (1993), is a life-size waxwork self-portrait in which he adopts the identity of Sid Vicious, singing “My Way” in the pose of Elvis Presley as depicted by Andy Warhol. In more recent works such as Pile (2004), a painted bronze sculpture of a pile of garbage bags, Turk explores the way in which a work of art is invested with iconic status and value.
For his exhibition at Goodman Gallery, Turk will create an installation based on Andy Warhol’s Factory, the artist’s infamous original New York City studio, which Warhol occupied from 1962 until 1968. The gallery walls will be wallpapered with silver foil as a visual game with reflection and disorientation, against which a selection of recent paintings, silkscreens and sculptural pieces will be shown. The title of the show refers to Lacan’s ideas about child development and the emergence of self-consciousness. These will include the signature works Your authorised reflection and Erutangis (signature backwards), both of which are complementary riffs on this Narcissus theme.
Continuing the Warholian reference, the show will include a series of large-scale unique silkscreen portraits of the artist as Che Guevara, Joseph Beuys and Elvis Presley amongst others, as well as works based on Andy Warhol’s urine oxidation paintings— abstract works made by pissing on copper metallic painted canvas. Gavin Turk takes a Gestalt approach to cliché and iconic imagery, subverting our sense of what we think we are seeing with echoes of familiar characters who pervade our cultural consciousness like annoying déjà vu, or pop tunes running repetitively through our minds. Elvis Presley, Joseph Beuys, and Che Guevara are all iconic figures— heroes, consumed by the system and now the art.
Camouflage is used in the Warhol / Turk World as a bit of Orwellian Doublethink: as an urban fashion statement rather than nature’s method of concealment from predators and enemies. Gavin Turk takes Warhol from his newfound cultural state of enlightenment to a place of absurdist cliché, where his contribution to the degradation of cultural elitism mixed with the ultimate degeneration of heroism is complete.
Gavin Turk at Goodman Gallery (press release): 1 | 2
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