The table is made of steel. The top is finished with clear original ‘Briwax’ (for lustre) and the table legs are finished with linseed oil (to protect against discolouration). Being steel, the table will be vulnerable to rust if exposed to moisture, so should be stored off the floor in a dry place. The table can be buffed to a shine without re-waxing: use separate cloths for the legs and the tabletop. The exhaust is made of blown glass. This is a more delicate material than domestic glass and should be treated with great care. The surface is very vulnerable to scratching and all abrasive contact should be avoided. When cleaning, use only water and very mild products such as vinegar, baking soda or glass cleaner suitable for lead crystal. Take care to use only cloths, which will leave no lint behind, especially when cleaning the inside. ‘Wypall’ cloths or e-cloths are very good for this purpose.When handling and moving the glass exhaust, great care should be taken to support each piece at its most vulnerable points. Each piece should be supported under the main chamber (the heaviest part) with the other parts being cradled to prevent any stress at the different junctions. Take care to keep the glass away from zips and buttons on your clothes as you are carrying. The glass exhaust and tabletop will both be marked if the two are scuffed together, so when installing the glass work on the table, lift into place rather than dragging. Wear gloves to avoid fingerprints on either surface. Because the table surface is waxed, the glass exhaust will move and spin if it is knocked. Push the two glass parts together firmly to improve the stability of the piece.For Turk the exhaust pipe represents the transport of air and is a metaphor for both breathing and exhaustion. The 'pregnant snake-like object' also holds up an anthropological mirror to societies reliance on roads and transportation and the consumption of resources at the heart of this. This work relates to his current series of bronze exhaust pipes convincingly painted to resemble rusty iron that alludes to Duchamp's readymades whilst also referring to the pipe as a symbol of more innocent times, as Bertrand Russell and his fellow intellectuals puffed their way to enlightenment and the brave new world. In this particular manifestation, the pipe is created using the exhalation or exhaustion of breath to hand blow the glass into the desired shape.'

This Is Not A Pipe

Blown glass on steel table.

Transit

Vehicles

Automaton

Duchamp

Glass

The table is made of steel. The top is finished with clear original ‘Briwax’ (for lustre) and the table legs are finished with linseed oil (to protect against discolouration). Being steel, the table will be vulnerable to rust if exposed to moisture, so should be stored off the floor in a dry place. The table can be buffed to a shine without re-waxing: use separate cloths for the legs and the tabletop.

As a direct reference to the painting ‘La Victoire’ by Rene Magritte. Ajar is a surreal gateway: a spiritual journey through the imagination, an interactive sculpture that children will enjoy as much as adults. It is a key to the imagination: unlocking ideas of the infinite as mused on by Aldous Huxley quoting Blake. "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."	It simultaneously references Duchamp earlier work ‘11 Rue Larrey’ the door that is never open or shut. This sculpture is designed as an inside installation but with two doorways it is never definitively open or closed. Ajar would be placed without walls and permanently open encouraging the choice to go around, or go through.

Ajar (Highbury)

Patinated bronze

Doors

Painted Bronze

As a direct reference to the painting ‘La Victoire’ by Rene Magritte. Ajar is a surreal gateway: a spiritual journey through the imagination, an interactive sculpture that children will enjoy as much as adults. It is a key to the imagination: unlocking ideas of the infinite as mused on by Aldous Huxley quoting Blake. "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."

Installation info: Handle carefully with gloves, ensuring when placed it is done so gently as painted edges are fragile. Ensure signed underside is face down.  Avoid direct sunlight, temperature fluctuations and moisture.

H.M.S Queequeg

Painted bronze

Waste

Packaging

Recycling

The Sea

Domestic

Installation info: Handle carefully with gloves, ensuring when placed it is done so gently as painted edges are fragile. Ensure signed underside is face down. Avoid direct sunlight, temperature fluctuations and moisture.

A bronze cast of a discarded, half eaten apple core, with a long stalk and pip showing, painted to look real. Eaten and then thrown away, Turk takes the discarded, shrivelled and dead and gives it new life in the form of miniature painted bronze sculptures. Heavy with the symbolism of an English Eden, these once ripe fruits, alongside their associations with knowledge and temptation, Adam’s apple and of course, Eve, have been discarded and tossed away. Now “rotten to the core”, the fruits of the utopian English garden have become a poisonous symbol of man’s fall. Or perhaps they are nothing more ominous than evidence of a healthy diet in which their daily consumption contains the promise to keep the doctor away.

Given

Apples

Food

A bronze cast of a discarded, half eaten apple core, with a long stalk and pip showing, painted to look real.

Installation info: To be displayed in custom made steel and glass vitrine as per photosBronze exhaust pipe painted to look real

Conduit

Installation info: To be displayed in custom made steel and glass vitrine as per photosBronze exhaust pipe painted to look real

Exhaust

Installation info: To be displayed in custom made steel and glass vitrine as per photos Bronze exhaust pipe painted to look real

A bronze cast of a shrivelled apple core with red skin and stalk, painted to look real.

Sculpture

A bronze cast of a shrivelled apple core with red skin and stalk, painted to look real.

Untitled (Rubbing)

Rubbing on paper

Work on paper

Van Air

Balloon, string, wax seals and wooden base

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.

Warhol

Silkscreen

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.

American Box

Consume

An appropriation of Lucio Fontana's "Fine di Dio" (The End of God), this egg-shaped painting is dramatically perforated, its rich painterly surface vandalized as Gavin Turk's initials are subtly cast by the punctured holes, revealing the empty space behind the canvas whilst remitting the painting to a three-dimensional object. The egg, as a heavily charged archetypal sign brings-up notions of beginning and end, the alpha and omega of all things, a closed loop, that which is before speech and thought, the inaccessible unknown. The fleshy quality of the paint surrounding the punctures on the canvas allude to Jesus Christ's stigmata. Titled "Holy Egg", this series of works plays with notions of the authenticity of art as well as the aura of the artwork, alluding to the religious symbolism associated with the egg as well as to a long-standing historical relationship between art and religion, iconography and iconoclasm.

Holy Egg (Buff)

Diamond dust and acrylic paint on canvas

Acrylic paint and diamond dust on canvas

An appropriation of Lucio Fontana's "Fine di Dio" (The End of God), this egg-shaped painting is dramatically perforated, its rich painterly surface vandalized as Gavin Turk's initials are subtly cast by the punctured holes, revealing the empty space behind the canvas whilst remitting the painting to a three-dimensional object. The egg, as a heavily charged archetypal sign brings-up notions of beginning and end, the alpha and omega of all things, a closed loop, that which is before speech and thought, the inaccessible unknown. The fleshy quality of the paint surrounding the punctures on the canvas allude to Jesus Christ's stigmata. Titled "Holy Egg", this series of works plays with notions of the authenticity of art as well as the aura of the artwork, alluding to the religious symbolism associated with the egg as well as to a long-standing historical relationship between art and religion, iconography and iconoclasm.

Alchemy

Painting

An appropriation of Lucio Fontana's "Fine di Dio" (The End of God), this egg-shaped painting is dramatically perforated, its rich painterly surface vandalized as Gavin Turk's initials are subtly cast by the punctured holes, revealing the empty space behind the canvas whilst remitting the painting to a three-dimensional object. The egg, as a heavily charged archetypal sign brings-up notions of beginning and end, the alpha and omega of all things, a closed loop, that which is before speech and thought, the inaccessible unknown.

Star

Red neon mounted on a box behind perspex

Signs

Argon Candle

Neon Sculpture on black plinth

Fire

Holy Egg (Yellow)

Superego

c-type prints

C-type colour print collage

Photographic Work

Banana

Yellow neon

Illusion

‘This Is Not a Pipe’ The exhaust pipe, which carries noxious gases, can be imagined as metaphor for both breathing and exhaustion. The pregnant, snake-like object is an anthropological mirror to societies addiction to roads and transportation, that consume natural resources and create air pollution. This glass work recalls Gavin Turk’s series of ‘real’ exhaust pipes that are cast in bronze and convincingly painted to resemble the dirty, rusty iron and alloy pipes that they once were. Gavin Turk points us to Marcel Duchamp's readymade’s whilst also referring to the ‘this is not a pipe’, pipe of Rene Magritte and a symbol of more innocent times, where Bertrand Russell and his fellow intellectuals puffed their way to enlightenment and the Brave New World. This reflexive artwork is itself formed by being heated in a furnace (with integral chimney) then transferred to a blowpipe and using the exhalation of breath to blow the glass. Whilst the exquisite, choreographed ballet of twisting, blowing, turning around the bench, tools and temperature control creates the piece into the desired shape.

‘This Is Not a Pipe’The exhaust pipe, which carries noxious gases, can be imagined as metaphor for both breathing and exhaustion. The pregnant, snake-like object is an anthropological mirror to societies addiction to roads and transportation, that consume natural resources and create air pollution. This glass work recalls Gavin Turk’s series of ‘real’ exhaust pipes that are cast in bronze and convincingly painted to resemble the dirty, rusty iron and alloy pipes that they once were. Gavin Turk points us to Marcel Duchamp's readymade’s whilst also referring to the ‘this is not a pipe’, pipe of Rene Magritte and a symbol of more innocent times, where Bertrand Russell and his fellow intellectuals puffed their way to enlightenment and the Brave New World. This reflexive artwork is itself formed by being heated in a furnace (with integral chimney) then transferred to a blowpipe and using the exhalation of breath to blow the glass. Whilst the exquisite, choreographed ballet of twisting, blowing, turning around the bench, tools and temperature control creates the piece into the desired shape.

‘This Is Not a Pipe’ The exhaust pipe, which carries noxious gases, can be imagined as metaphor for both breathing and exhaustion. The pregnant, snake-like object is an anthropological mirror to societies addiction to roads and transportation, that consume natural resources and create air pollution. This glass work recalls Gavin Turk’s series of ‘real’ exhaust pipes that are cast in bronze and convincingly painted to resemble the dirty, rusty iron and alloy pipes that they once were.

Basalt

Exhaust emissions on paper, mounted on linen

Rubbish

Libido

Totem

Cross

Oedipus

Double Gold Pop Gun

Silkscreen on gold leaf on paper

For Turk, the subject of his art is often art itself: repurposing the heroic movements that epitomized ideals of progress, trading upon their enduring values of cultural capital. Turk’s One Twenty Five is an extension of a recent series of outdoor sculptures that play on Joseph Beuys’ concept of Social Sculpture: the world as a collaborative artwork, where everyone is an artist by virtue of contributing to society. Cast in bronze, Turk’s monolithic nails are set within the landscape, literally puncturing the earth with monumental evidence of a god-like craftsmanship. Transforming this motif into neon – replete with glowing shadow – Turk’s One Twenty Five, now referring to a metaphysical clock, pictures a nail on the gallery wall: simultaneously an armature, an artwork, and a vacancy sign, his own-brand insignia an open invitation.

One Twenty Five

Orange glass nail with red shadow

Nail

For Turk, the subject of his art is often art itself: repurposing the heroic movements that epitomized ideals of progress, trading upon their enduring values of cultural capital. Turk’s One Twenty Five is an extension of a recent series of outdoor sculptures that play on Joseph Beuys’ concept of Social Sculpture: the world as a collaborative artwork, where everyone is an artist by virtue of contributing to society. Cast in bronze, Turk’s monolithic nails are set within the landscape, literally puncturing the earth with monumental evidence of a god-like craftsmanship.

This Is Not A Pipe

Ajar (Highbury)

H.M.S Queequeg

Given

Conduit

Cor

Untitled (Rubbing)

Van Air

Vanacular

American Box

Holy Egg (Buff)

Star

Argon Candle

Holy Egg (Yellow)

Superego

Banana

Id

This Is Not A Pipe

Basalt

Libido

Totem

Cross

Oedipus

Double Gold Pop Gun

One Twenty Five

Double Silver Pop Gun

Oracle

Dream Machine

Parapraxis

Ego