Exhibitions2003Spare Change
Spare Change
1 Mar 03
Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin
In 2003, Contemporary Fine Arts welcomed Gavin Turk for his first solo exhibition in Berlin with Spare Change.
Gavin Turk's multifaceted body of work is characterised by a playful approach to
Courtesy of Live Stock Market Ltd. & Gavin Turk
the concept of art and its representative objects. Painted bronze trompe l’oeils of a cardboard box and garbage bag question, as it were, our perception of banal everyday objects as well as the relationship between high and low culture, the valuable and the worthless, the representative and the banal.
A shabby sleeping bag, in its objecthood, initially recalls the meagre shelter of the homeless. Only in the knowledge of the deception - this object is also cast in bronze - and the contextual rapture of a "street aesthetic" into an "exhibition aesthetic" does the object appear to the viewer in its existential dimension.