In December of 2018, Alteria Art, Cob Gallery and James Putnam presented&nbsp;Through the Looking Glass- an exhibition of miniature artworks from a selected blend of international modern and contemporary artists.&nbsp;The exhibition title referenced Lewis Carroll’s sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in which the protagonist’s journey is defined by constant transformations in size.

Taking this as its germ, the multidisciplinary works included in&nbsp;Through the Looking Glass&nbsp;activated viewer’s sensory perceptions of scale across two and three dimensions, compounding a complex human psychological fascination with both the possibility, and seeming impossibility of the miniature pitted against the scale of our bodies.&nbsp;Turk’s contributions included tiny painted bronze trompe l’oeil sculptures of discarded items, like a spent match – an ironical comment on value – and an 18k gold half-eaten Rich Tea biscuit.

Young contemporary artists on exhibit include Hirosuke Yabe, Realf Heygate, Tristan Pigott, Charlotte Colbert, Antony Cairns and artist duo Walter &amp; Zoniel blended with established artistic talent including Polly Morgan, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Gavin Turk and Mat Collishaw. These were interwoven with alongside exemplary modern artists’ works from Pablo Picasso and Lynn Chadwick.

Featured artists included: Alice Anderson, Becky Beasley, Zadok Ben David, Paul Benney, &nbsp;Emmanouil Bitsakis, Antony Cairns, Alexander Calder, James Capper, Lynn Chadwick, Jake &amp; Dinos Chapman, Charlotte Colbert, Susan Collis, Mat Collishaw, Adeline de Monseignat, India Dewar, Simon Faithfull, Tessa Farmer, Kitty Finer, Nancy&nbsp; Fouts, Nina Mae Fowler, Realf Heygate · Alba Hodsoll · Carlo &amp; Fabio Ingrassia · Soojin Kang · Idris Khan · Simon Linke, Reuben Mednikoff, Polly Morgan, Annie Morris, Grayson Perry, Pablo Picasso, Tristan Pigott, Shahpour Pouyan, Joshua Press, Cat Roissetter, Jason Shulman, Kenji&nbsp;Sugiyama, Akiko &amp; Masako Takada, Gavin Turk, Eloise van der Heyden, Craig Wylie, Hirosuke Yabe, Walter &amp; Zoniel and Yuri Zupancic

&nbsp;

In December of 2018, Alteria Art, Cob Gallery and James Putnam presented Through the Looking Glass- an exhibition of miniature artworks from a selected blend of international modern and contemporary artists. The exhibition title referenced Lewis Carroll’s sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in which the protagonist’s journey is defined by constant transformations in size.

Through the Looking Glass

This exhibition engaged with familiar tropes in Turk’s oeuvre, fusing elements of cultural identity with ways of seeing - or not seeing; surprising the viewer with what they think they know and what they presume they have seen.&nbsp;The show played with icons of modern art history and contemporary culture in a powerful series of images that presage current and future world events.

The show was a reflection of the tumultuous socio-political situation in which it was created: contextualised by Brexit, the rise of the far-right, and geopolitical unravelling. As Britain prepared to crash out of the EU, the nightmarish crashed white transit van was a fitting metaphor of the times.

Presenting initially as ‘abstracts’ rendered in a restrained palette of secondary colours, the works in the portfolio reveal themselves as a series of repeated photographic images of crashed white transit vans – a recurring theme for Turk since 2010. 

The ‘White Van Man’ has become part of contemporary folklore: a white male in a battered Ford Transit who delivers goods and services in a post high street Britain where global logistics have become intertwined with the paranoid fear of being taken advantage of by bureaucrats and by migrating foreigners.

Originally manufactured on the first factory production line by Ford in the USA, the Transit van, with its signature style logo badge, is a mass-produced branded product adopted by the UK as its own. Offering a host of cultural references for the viewer, a&nbsp;link can be made with Warhol’s Factory, the studio scene that pumped out authentic reproductions of celebrity and consumer culture. Warhol’s art, created using yesterdays’ news and popular culture, has now become the industry standard for ‘safe’ modern art investments.

This portfolio of images also reminds us of Grand Theft Auto; the violent but pioneering computer game of British design. GTA pays homage to an American Dream gone very wrong - cars once seen as a symbol of freedom and democracy digitally transformed into the destructive rebel’s weapon of choice.&nbsp;

The phenomenon of consumer culture gone mad is a theme playfully referenced in Turk’s oeuvre, from the signature painted bronze binbag sculptures and cardboard boxes to these repeated images of a Transit van, deconstructed and crushed. 

From crash to burn out, the demise of a once proud working class is encapsulated in the violent death of an anachronistic world played out in this White Van Man series&nbsp;-&nbsp;a plaintive statement and memorial for a transforming Britain no longer confident of its own identity, delivered within the aesthetic of American Pop. It perhaps asks the question; is the loss of our green and pleasant land an accidental act of self-harm?

White Van Man (1)

This exhibition engaged with familiar tropes in Turk’s oeuvre, fusing elements of cultural identity with ways of seeing - or not seeing; surprising the viewer with what they think they know and what they presume they have seen. The show played with icons of modern art history and contemporary culture in a powerful series of images that presage current and future world events.

White Van Man

MOSTYN, Wales UK presented this group exhibition of works by over 40 contemporary artists from the David Roberts Collection, marking the first off-site collaboration by David Roberts Art Foundation (DRAF). 

Inspired by the story of a 22-year-old woman in Lyon who gained sight for the first time, the exhibition was designed to resonate with the ideas found in Space and Sight. Each artist re-conceived day-to-day objects and materials in unexpected ways – a bench, plug socket, grate, section of railing or broom – inviting viewers to see alternative qualities and narratives therein. 

Some artists used precious materials to confer value to unremarkable commonplace objects, such as Gavin Turk's cardboard box cast in bronzen or Susan Collis’ paint-splattered broom, inlaid with mother-of-pearl.&nbsp;Other subtle modifications to objects subvert their use: wooden bannister rails jointed into an endless loop, public benches where the seat is elevated beyond reach, notebooks opened to face the wall so their contents are entirely obscured. 

She sees the shadows was accompanied by a new publication with responses to the project from writers Orit Gat, Claire Potter and Sally O’Reilly, and artists David Birkin, Jason Dodge, Marine Hugonnier, Marlie Mul, Magali Reus and Douglas White. 

Featured artists included: Caroline Achaintre, Horst Ademeit, Fiona Banner, Sara Barker, Phyllida Barlow, Neil Beloufa, David Birkin, Karla Black, Carol Bove, Martin Boyce, Lea Cetera, Susan Collis, Thomas Demand, Jason Dodge, Boyle Family, Theaster Gates, Isa Genzken, Rodney Graham, Harry Gruyaert, Jeppe Hein, Marine Hugonnier, Pierre Huyghe, Matthew Day Jackson, Tatsuya Kimata, Rachel Kneebone, Elad Lassry, Bob Law, Nina Beier &amp; Marie Lund, Kris Martin, Marlie Mul, Nika Neelova, Man Ray, Magali Reus, Pietro Roccasalva, Analia Saban, Erin Shirreff, Monika Sosnowska, Oscar Tuazon, Gavin Turk, Franz West, Douglas White.&nbsp;

She Sees the Shadows

MOSTYN, Wales UK presented this group exhibition of works by over 40 contemporary artists from the David Roberts Collection, marking the first off-site collaboration by David Roberts Art Foundation (DRAF).

In July of 2018, Reflex Gallery presented an exciting group exhibition with a selection of diverse works by some of the most exciting practitioners of contemporary art from around the globe. In Times of Plenty: The Shape of Things Today presented everyday objects and – by recasting them in a gallery setting – asked audiences to question, not only the nature of art, but more the nature of our contemporary society, with its rampant consumerism, disposable culture and overexposure to iconic brands. 

Participating artists included: Gavin Turk, Donald Baechler, Erwin Wurm, Ichwan Noor, Joel Morrison, Keith Covntry, Michael Craig-Martin.

Gavin Turk's Holy Egg (2018) is an appropriation of Lucio Fontana's Fine di Dio from his famed Concetto Spaziale series. The egg, a highly charged symbol with connotations of the circle of life, is two-dimensional here, cast in blackened brass. With its perforated surface suggesting the artist's initials, it is mysterious and relic-like in one context, and throwaway, a piece of scrap-metal, in another. His tiny wizened Malus Domestica (2017) is both astonishingly ordinary in its hyperrealism, and an exquisite piece of craftsmanship.

In Times of Plenty: The Shape of Things Today

In July of 2018, Reflex Gallery presented an exciting group exhibition with a selection of diverse works by some of the most exciting practitioners of contemporary art from around the globe. In Times of Plenty: The Shape of Things Today presented everyday objects and – by recasting them in a gallery setting – asked audiences to question, not only the nature of art, but more the nature of our contemporary society, with its rampant consumerism, disposable culture and overexposure to iconic brands.

Dialogues with A Collection presented a stage of relationships between artists and the collection of Laure Genillard. Eleven artists were invited to engage with different works from the collection with either a newly constructed or an existing work, creating a trail of impromptu correspondences across the gallery space. 

Artists included from the collection: Sebastian Diaz Morales, Dean Hughes, Elisa Sighicelli, Martin Creed, Frank Heath, Peter Downsbrough, Syvie Fleury, Stephen Willats, David Connearn, Yoko Ono and Tomma Abt.

Invited artists: Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, David Connearn, Lucy Heyward, Dean Hughes, Gerhard Lang, Isabelle Lartault, George Henry Longly, Sarah Staton, Name Surname, Gavin Turk and Grace Weir.

Italian for “do it yourself tapestry”, Turk’s Arazzo Fan Da Te (2012) is exactly what it says on the box. Embroidered by Laure Genillard over the course of several weeks, the DIY kit was sent with a set of instructions to create a Gavin Turk tapestry in the form of a ‘string-agram’ of the artist’s name in capital letters. The tapestry is a repeat of Turk’s homage to Italian conceptual artist Alighiero Boetti, who, using this typeface, created poetic tapestries investigating identity through collaboration and multiplication.

Gavin Turk Arazzo Fai Da Te, 2012, Embroidery thread, cloth, hoop, stretcher, instruction booklet and box, 2700 x 2700 x 450 mm

Dialogues with A Collection presented a stage of relationships between artists and the collection of Laure Genillard. Eleven artists were invited to engage with different works from the collection with either a newly constructed or an existing work, creating a trail of impromptu correspondences across the gallery space.

Dialogues With A Collection

PLAY was a city festival that took over the centre of Kortrijk with contemporary works of art. The immersive indoor and outdoor city-wide festival dissected our relationship with ‘play’. The festival consisted of more than 40 installations by national and international artists interested in the interactive aspect of art and the relationship between an artwork and the observer, the space and urban developments.

For the work presented at PLAY, Gavin Turk paid tribute to the conceptual artist André Cadere’s, Barres de bois rond. Turk’s series of mobile and nomadic artworks, Le Bike de Bois Rond, allowed the public to ride through the streets of Kortijk’s city centre, creating art performances and simultaneously becoming artworks. &nbsp;

PLAY was a city festival that took over the centre of Kortrijk with contemporary works of art. The immersive indoor and outdoor city-wide festival dissected our relationship with ‘play’. The festival consisted of more than 40 installations by national and international artists interested in the interactive aspect of art and the relationship between an artwork and the observer, the space and urban developments.

PLAY KORTRIJK

Co-ordinated by Grayson Perry RA, the 250th Summer Exhibition featured works in an array of mediums from its range of acclaimed and emerging artists. 

Perry and his committee of fellow artists handpicked over 1,300 artworks including Turk’s painted bronze Tulips (2017) as well as work by artists including:&nbsp;Anish Kapoor, David Shrigley, Martin Parr,&nbsp;David Hockney,&nbsp;Wolfgang Tillmans,&nbsp;Rose Wylie,&nbsp;Bruce Nauman, Mike Nelson, Joana Vasconcelos, Mona Hatoum, Ed Ruscha and Tracey Emin. 

The exhibition extended across the&nbsp;recently-expanded cultural campus, with prints on display in The Sackler Wing of Galleries and a “room of humour” in the Ronald and Rita McAulay Gallery. The art extravaganza even spilled out into the streets of London’s West End, with an&nbsp;installation of over 200 flags&nbsp;designed by Royal Academicians.

Summer Exhibition 2018

Co-ordinated by Grayson Perry RA, the 250th Summer Exhibition featured works in an array of mediums from its range of acclaimed and emerging artists. Perry and his committee of fellow artists handpicked over 1,300 artworks including Turk’s painted bronze Tulips (2017) as well as work by artists including: Anish Kapoor, David Shrigley, Martin Parr, David Hockney, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rose Wylie, Bruce Nauman, Mike Nelson, Joana Vasconcelos, Mona Hatoum, Ed Ruscha and Tracey Emin.

Summer Exhibition 2018 

The subject of this exhibition at Messums Wiltshire was the central focus of our lives, the hub of all our senses: the head. The earliest work in the exhibition was an enigmatically smiling portrait of an elite government official from ancient Egypt carved out of diorite marble more than 2,500 years ago. The exhibition also featured works by contemporary artists who explored notions of fragmented identity through the destruction of a sculpted head. 

Gavin Turk, Glynn Williams and Laurence Edwards, had all created heads that are spliced, smashed and rebuilt as metaphors for the human struggle including Turk’s Ragut Kirn (2010). The piece was one of a series of 72 self-portrait heads in clay and then invited members of the public to come and distort them with the result that the sculpture exhibited here was one of many that had a hole gouged out where facial features should be.

PARTICIPATING GALLERIES: Ariadne Galleries Bowman Sculpture Ben Brown Fine Arts Daniel Katz Gallery Marlborough Fine Art Pace Gallery Pangolin London Tomasso Brothers Fine Art Rupert Wace Ancient Art 

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS: Ralph Brown Peter Burke Antonio Canova Ellen Christiansen Keith Coventry John Davies Laurence Edwards Abigail Fallis Elisabeth Frink Kevin Francis Gray Sean Henry Eric Kennington RA David Mach Christy Symington Brian Taylor Nuria Torres Gavin Turk Glynn Williams Jonathan Yeo Emily Young

Installation photo

The subject of this exhibition at Messums Wiltshire was the central focus of our lives, the hub of all our senses: the head. The earliest work in the exhibition was an enigmatically smiling portrait of an elite government official from ancient Egypt carved out of diorite marble more than 2,500 years ago. The exhibition also featured works by contemporary artists who explored notions of fragmented identity through the destruction of a sculpted head.

The Revelation of the Head

Il Terzo Giorno was an exhibition featuring the works of major international artists reflecting on the theme of environmental sustainability and the human-nature relationship. Parma, named Italian Capital of Culture 2020, was hosting the show at the Palazzo del Governatore, in the historic heart of the city.

Il Terzo Giorno was a retrospective made up of 155 works including paintings, photographs and installation, by 40 artists including Gavin Turk, Marina Abramovic, Noboyushi Araki, Sebastião Selgado, Roger Ballen, Mario Giacomelli and Gabriele Basilico. Curated by Didi Bozzini and promoted by the City of Parma, it substituted scientific denunciation for a creative and sensitive vision of the world that make people reflect on the need to live the commitment of sustainability and safeguard the planet on a daily basis. 

The exhibition, was the first in Italy to take a charitable approach to improving the urban environment: 50% of ticket sales were given to the City of Parma to finance the "Km Verde" project to clean the air with 22 thousand anti-smog trees and shrubs along the A1 highway. The inspiration for the title, which literally translates as ‘The Third Day’, comes from the third day of Genesis, the appearance of life on earth, through creation, destruction, to the redemption of man's return to nature.

Il Terzo Giorno

Il Terzo Giorno was an exhibition featuring the works of major international artists reflecting on the theme of environmental sustainability and the human-nature relationship. Parma, named Italian Capital of Culture 2020, was hosting the show at the Palazzo del Governatore, in the historic heart of the city.

In My Shoes&nbsp;was an Arts Council Collection Touring Exhibition that explored the ways in which artists based in the UK have represented themselves in their work since the 1990s. Encompassing a range of media including film, photography and sculpture, In My Shoes drew primarily from the Arts Council Collection, with key loans from other UK collections, to investigate these dynamic approaches. 

The exhibition offered a timely opportunity to consider the legacy of a key aspect of 1990s British art. The show begins with key early works by so-called ‘Young British Artists’ including Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas and Gavin Turk, who received international attention for putting themselves in the frame with bold and confrontational works. The exhibition continued with the work of a younger generation of artists including Rachel Maclean and Bedwyr Williams who had each established an active role within their work.

The Exhibition was presented at the following locations:&nbsp;Longside Gallery,Yorkshire Sculpture Park; Attenborough Arts Centre, University of Leicester;&nbsp;PACCAR Room, Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-upon-Avon;&nbsp;Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Aberystwyth University ;&nbsp;Exhibition curated by Natalie Rudd, assisted by Rachel Graves; The Harley Gallery, Welbeck.

In My Shoes: Art & The Self Since The 1990's

In My Shoes was an Arts Council Collection Touring Exhibition that explored the ways in which artists based in the UK have represented themselves in their work since the 1990s. Encompassing a range of media including film, photography and sculpture, In My Shoes drew primarily from the Arts Council Collection, with key loans from other UK collections, to investigate these dynamic approaches. 

This was the third stage of an exhibition that was first set up in Brussels (Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium) and Paris in 2015 (Louvre Museum, in collaboration with Palais de Tokyo), then in Milano in 2016 (Palazzo Grassi). Based on the successful essay by famous French economist and thinker Jacques Attali, 'A Brief History of the Future', it gathered works by&nbsp;Hiroshi Sugimoto, Andy Wharol, David LaChapelle, Andreas Gursky, AES+F, Alighiero Boetti, Mona Hatoum, and many others to demonstrate how contemporary art deals with critical issues such as economics, ecology, social inequalities. Can art help us understand today’s world challenges? What will the world look like in 2050 if nothing changes?

The exhibition invited a total of more than fifty participating artists from Taiwan and abroad to adopt an angle of thinking about and probing the future from the point of view of contemporary works of art in exploring many of the social issues in today's world. This was the first international exchange exhibition to be co-organised by the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts and the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium.

Taking place in Taiwan and curated by Pierre-Yves Desaive, this edition of the show focused on the exchanges between the East and the West, including artists from all over the world such as Ai Weiwei, Phil Akashi, Fung Ming Chip, Jenny Holzer, On Kawara and Gavin Turk.

2050: A Brief History of the Future

This was the third stage of an exhibition that was first set up in Brussels (Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium) and Paris in 2015 (Louvre Museum, in collaboration with Palais de Tokyo), then in Milano in 2016 (Palazzo Grassi).

Works

Gavin Turk’s 6th solo exhibition at Galerie Krinzinger presented rubbish as art. And art as a system of social control. Turk is well known as the mercurial art surrealist, lightly nimble-stepping through his art historical references to inspire a second look and a quizzical frown. His work skips from cultural identity to surrealism often using visual illusions and poetic enigmas to capture the imagination.

At the same time, it quietly celebrates the charm of the irrelevant and the discarded whilst challenging the shifting reality of our contemporary thought. An alternative articulation of Descartes legendary philosophical utterance - I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am - echoes through the exhibition space.

In the gallery entrance, audiences were confronted by the magical illusion of a Magrittian gateway: an ominous wormhole controlled by a playfully bureaucratic wristband - a prison handcuff or a hospital tag. A crowd controller for gaining entry, but from where to where?

The eponymous canvases entitled Legend and God is Gone are a pair of Trompe l’Oeil conundrums. Religious tablets that could be post-apocalyptic views of our lost generation. Or are they no more than a child’s Sunday school flash cards: humorous instructions to read and remember to think.

The Looking Glass dominated the arched architectural grid in the chamber to the left of the space. Reflecting an image of the audience back at themselves, as in a shop window, the piece reveals the violence of our waste.

Another of the pieces included in the exhibition, Waterfall is a hand-drawn palimpsest - a human mimicking the computer, rather than the other way around. The crazed digits, symbols and cyphers spat from a printer whilst attempting to produce an image of Duchamp’s Waterfall.

A series of deftly framed snapshots capture the insanity of our digital age. With the mass capture and circulation of digital images, the mistakes, errors and digital blurs of a badly held phone camera represent the nauseating excess of our semi-cyborg generation. The images build meaning, reminding us of a half thought. They beguile us, musing on the edge as our minds struggle to grip hold of our reality: with the charm of the unknowable. The scatological fascination of our dysfunctional technologies to be deciphered by an ancestor looking back on the insane speed of progress.

At the end of the gallery shrines to our wasteful excess were installed - agglomerations, clumps and assemblages of cultural waste. The futuristic museum plinths were displayed like sterile sci-fi capsules containing the grubby evidence of our profligacy. With names like PSION and VXACT suggesting a medical or scientific purpose, the planks leaned against the gallery walls alluding to the language of an ancient or future tribe to whom our excreted waste would seem sacred.

God is Gone

Gavin Turk’s 6th solo exhibition at Galerie Krinzinger presented rubbish as art. And art as a system of social control. Turk is well known as the mercurial art surrealist, lightly nimble-stepping through his art historical references to inspire a second look and a quizzical frown. His work skips from cultural identity to surrealism often using visual illusions and poetic enigmas to capture the imagination.

This exhibition celebrated the donation of six important works by Peter Blake, Michael Craig-Martin, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Gavin Turk and Rachel Whiteread to the Pallant House Gallery collection.

The donated works - including Turk's Dump (2004) - ranged from paintings to sculptures, helping demonstrate the&nbsp;legacy of British Pop Art and the development of conceptual art in Britain through the works of the Young British Artists, a loose group of British artists who began exhibiting together in the late 1980s.

Gavin Turk, Dump, 2004

This exhibition celebrated the donation of six important works by Peter Blake, Michael Craig-Martin, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Gavin Turk and Rachel Whiteread to the Pallant House Gallery collection.

Through the Looking Glass

White Van Man

She Sees the Shadows

In Times of Plenty: The Shape of Things Today

Dialogues With A Collection

PLAY KORTRIJK

Summer Exhibition 2018

The Revelation of the Head

Il Terzo Giorno

In My Shoes: Art & The Self Since The 1990's

2050: A Brief History of the Future

Works

God is Gone

Young British Artists: The Frank and Lorna Dunphy Gift