Transit Disaster Hoodie Silver

Silkscreen on canvas

1260 x 1850 x 350 mm

2017

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.