Following a hugely successful crowdfunding campaign ‘Piscio d’Artista’, Gavin Turk exhibited the work with a selection of others in an exhibition in the heart of Soho, London’s Westend to experience the Artist’s Piss in real life. 

In a nod to Piero Manzoni’s Merde D’Artiste and Warhol’s Campbell Soup, the art provocateur Gavin Turk created the perfect artwork to express the complexity of our contemporary jeopardy. During the Pandemic of 2020 – 2021, the Artist canned his own urine in a modified canning factory at his studio in Canning Town, East London. 

Through this act the artist created a minimal impact artwork for a profligate society that has everything the heart could desire. The recycling of body waste has been put through the recycling of art history, encapsulated in a limited edition super shiny recycled aluminium can with the title of the work Artist’s Piss translated into 30 languages. Set against the backdrop of a culture that consumes more than 2 billion sweet fizzy canned drinks per day, the reflective surface of this work and its contents asks us to think about what we value. 

This limited art edition of ‘Artist’s Piss’ continues in the lineage of Gavin Turk elegant paradigm shifting comments on value and waste. With a provocative invitation to desire our own waste products, and elevate our disgust to a fascination with value, this iconic relic will adorn contemporary mantlepieces for years to come.

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Artist's Piss 

An exhibition in the Heart of Soho 

Following a hugely successful crowdfunding campaign ‘Piscio d’Artista’, Gavin Turk exhibited the work with a selection of others in an exhibition in the heart of Soho, London’s Westend to experience the Artist’s Piss in real life.

Corpus Domani - From the glorified body to the ruins of the soul, a major exhibition curated by Francesca Alfano Miglietti. The exhibition is sponsored and produced by Palazzo Reale and Comune di Milano-Cultura, in collaboration with Marsilio Arte and Tenderstories. 
 
111 works - installations, sculptures, drawings, paintings, video installations, and photographs - by 34 internationally recognised artists, some of them true icons of contemporary art, are on display for the first time in Italy to collectively capture the multiplicity of the ways in which the human being is represented.

The title refers to the disappearance of the 'real body' in favour of the 'body of the spectacle': from the Glorified Body - the body of awareness, of rebellion, of otherness - to the Contemporary Body – intended on the one hand as the body of our spectacle-based society, and on the other in its most poetic forms of exodus, of work, of the silent multitude.

“The boundary between real and imaginary is less and less recognisable, to the point of absorbing reality into a screen, as demonstrated by the obsessive presence of screens in our lives: the flat screens of televisions and computers, video games, smartphones”, writes the curator, who goes on to say, “The screen erases the distance between the viewer and the viewed, invites us to immerse ourselves in it, offers us a reality we can hold in our hand, but on which our hand has no grip”.

In 1,000 square meters of exhibition space, the installation unfolds as an analysis of the emergence of new forms of representation in the contemporary world, focusing on the historical passage from the living body that was the protagonist of Body Art to the reinvented body of Hyperrealism, on the changing aesthetic canons of representation, and on the powerful evocation of the individual through the traces that s/he leaves behind. A story intended to reflect on the crisis of sensory experience triggered by the advent of a culture that offers perfect bodies, modified bodies, bodies that have been re-conceived and re-produced, and thus essentially fake.

On display are works by AES+F, Janine Antoni, Yael Bartana, Zharko Basheski, Joseph Beuys, Christian Boltanski, Vlassis Caniaris, Chen Zhen, John De Andrea, Gino de Dominicis, Carole A. Feuerman, Franko B, Robert Gober, Antony Gormley, Duane Hanson, Alfredo Jaar, Kimsooja, Joseph Kosuth, Charles LeDray, Robert Longo, Urs Lüthi, Ibrahim Mahama, Fabio Mauri, Oscar Muñoz, Gina Pane, Marc Quinn, Carol Rama, Michal Rovner, Andres Serrano, Chiharu Shiota, Marc Sijan, Dayanita Singh, Sun Yuan e Peng Yu, Gavin Turk.&nbsp;

Many artists, museums, foundations, archives, galleries, and collectors worked together in Italy and abroad on the 'construction' of the exhibition, which offers a first re-examination of the concept of humanity after the shock and upheaval of Covid19.

From the works of the historical hyperrealists, we arrive at other narrative typologies where the body is evoked rather than represented, where it seems to have vanished, leaving only the traces of having been there; the human being is evoked through clothing, through the remnants of his work or nomadic existence, as well as through fragments of the body and its mutation which reflect the shifting social conditions of the contemporary world.

A special mention should go to Christian Boltanski, who passed away just recently, who is present in the exhibition with the work Le Terril Grand-Hornu (2015). A special section is dedicated to Lea Vergine: a sort of "private" room, created in collaboration with the Archivio Lea Vergine, in featuring works that have characterized her critical enquiry, along with books, documents, and photographs that testify to her invaluable and singular contribution to the field of Body Art, which remains an essential touchstone in the history of the representation of the body.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an illustrated bilingual catalogue (Italian-English) published by Marsilio Editori, which contains an essay by the curator and contributions from Vincenzo Argentieri, Franco Berardi “Bifo”, Furio Colombo, Francesca Giacomelli, Gianfranco Ravasi, Massimo Recalcati, Chiara Spangaro, Gino Strada, and Moreno Zani.

Special thanks go to those who loaned works to the exhibition, from museums, artists, and foundations (Athens, The National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST); Bolzano, Museion; Catania, Fondazione Brodbeck; Milan, Fondazione Prada; United States, Hall Art Foundation), to archives (Foligno, Archivio Gino de Dominicis; Milan, Archivio Lea Vergine; Rome, Archivio Fabio Mauri), to private galleries (Athens, Kalfayan Galleries; Brescia, Galleria Apalazzo; Bruxelles, Nathalie Obadia; London, Frith Street Gallery; London, Richard Saltoun; Milan, Lia Rumma; Milan, Raffaella Cortese; New York, Luhring Augustine; New York, Metro Pictures; New York, Pace Gallery; New York, Peter Freeman; Paris, Noirmont Art Productions; Paris, Mor Charpentier; San Gimignano, Galleria Continua; Venice, Bel-Air Fine Arts). For their invaluable collaboration, our thanks go to Moreno Zani and Luca De Michelis.

Wittgenstein

Palazzo Reale, Milan

Corpus Domani - From the glorified body to the ruins of the soul, a major exhibition curated by Francesca Alfano Miglietti. The exhibition is sponsored and produced by Palazzo Reale and Comune di Milano-Cultura, in collaboration with Marsilio Arte and Tenderstories.

Corpus Domini

For the inauguration of its new space, Aeroplastics is offering a major exhibition whose title echoes the uncertainty in which our contemporary world is plunged: Come What May. More than thirty artists have been invited to participate, each offering a personal and original reflection on the challenges that humanity must face today, whether they are ecological, social, human or economic in nature. However, it is not a question of producing a manifesto or a plea: the event is above all an opportunity to reaffirm the aesthetic line followed by Aeroplastics since its beginnings, characterised by a taste for audacity and experimentation, diversity, the hidden meaning of images and words, but also humour and the second degree. The paintings, sculptures, videos, drawings, photos and installations gathered here do not claim to provide answers to the questions raised by the present or future chaos, but invite an open-mindedness that, it is not forbidden to dream, could help to change the course of things.

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Aeroplastics 

For the inauguration of its new space, Aeroplastics is offering a major exhibition whose title echoes the uncertainty in which our contemporary world is plunged: Come What May. More than thirty artists have been invited to participate, each offering a personal and original reflection on the challenges that humanity must face today, whether they are ecological, social, human or economic in nature.

COME WHAT MAY

‘Big Medicine,’ is a bold, celebratory show across all three major galleries within GIANT. Featuring works by major international artists such as Jake and Dinos Chapman, Jim Lambie and Gavin Turk, it takes an optimistic, humorous and entertaining approach in demonstrating the utility art has to re-unite societal ties in public space. Also exhibited are Gary Card, Nicky Carvell, Paola Ciarska, Eva Cremers, Chad Person, Anthony Rodinone, Paul Fryer and Paul Trefry.

‘Big Medicine’ sets the agenda for the gallery in future years. Taking its position in a small and largely culturally underserved seaside town of Bournemouth, here GIANT knowingly pokes fun at its high street location, issuing a rally cry for the importance of the arts to heal cultural wounds through shared experience. It has a subtle yet potent backdrop of counter cultural moments of connection – times in which the arts have moved us forward societally, from the 1967 summer of love, through to the 90s illegal rave scene, overlaid with the trials and tribulations of technology and science.&nbsp;

‘Big Medicine’ is an exhibition on both a grand and microscopic scale. From giant inflatables and immersive rooms to miniature paintings, by both internationally renowned artists and new emerging voices, this vast exhibition serves to celebrate and re-ignite our connection with one another in public space. With our lives increasingly dominated by the digital, the show is an invitation to get physical, to play and to interact, allowing art and the space it inhabits to act as a mediator in us reuniting and seeing one another again in a new light.

Technology and the pandemic have created the perfect storm for fear and atomization, and the exhibition is a timely and poignant reminder that the world we have returned to has changed drastically from the one we left behind pre-pandemic. In ‘Big Medicine’, curator Stuart Semple attempts to test the radical assumption that the experience of art could have a positive sociological effect on cultural wounding. Art itself could be the biggest cultural medicine we have.

Visitors are greeted by Chad Person’s gigantic inflatable sculpture Underdog, a cartoon canine in a superhero costume, staring down at his mobile phone, and Jake and Dinos Chapman present a series of bronze-cast suicide vests, the form of which is inspired by youtube clips of suicide bombers. The works, whilst reminiscent of Jeff Koons ‘Aqualung’ (1985), are hand painted in bright colours, featuring art materials where one would expect explosives. As one would expect from the brothers, a dialogue with death ensues, in which the risk and danger of being an artist is pitched against the power of the artist's conviction to fight for belief.

Bournemouth-born Gary Card returns to his hometown to create a fully immersive installation based on the ‘Hysterical’ world he built at Phillips auction house in London in 2019. Paul Trefry, well-known for photo realistic sculptures that question societal issues such as loneliness or homelessness, exhibits two works previously unseen in the UK – one a double life-sized sculpture of homeless man, the other a tiny old lady, waiting indefinitely on a park bench for a husband who never arrives.

The perfectionist pop aesthetic of Damien Hirst’s medicine cabinets is challenged by Gavin Turk in his own cabinet, in which he replaces Hirst’s meticulous pills with the detritus of pharmaceutical packaging, making us redress utopian images of the perfect society and challenging notions of birth, death and decay.

Paul Fryer’s Telstar (Understanding), is constructed from mixed exotic woods, and references Telstar 1, which launched on top of a Thor-Delta rocket on July 10, 1962 – it successfully relayed through space the first telephone&nbsp;calls, telegraph images, and transmitted the first live transatlantic television images: an American flag waving in the wind; a still image of Mount Rushmore; French singer Yves Montand, looking suave. And on July 23, 1962, President John F. Kennedy. At just under 3ft in diameter and powered by solar power, this object has had a potent and profound effect on mass communication, sowing the seeds for the connected world we inhabit today. Using this as a touchstone for the sculpture, Fryer explores notions of temporality, physics and the universe.

The back of the gallery houses a site-specific piece by Jim Lambie. This intervention recreates his iconic ZoBop vinyl floor, originally installed in the Scottish National Gallery. The work defines the space as a site of art and co-opts the architecture, once made for the pure aesthetic experience of shopping. It stands as a strong testament to purpose and reclamation of the high street as a site of artistic endeavour, a theme that continues in Nicky Carvell’s work, who presents the decay of the traditional town centre in a new stained-glass window installation created specifically for the show.

Rotrophydhian, 2017

‘Big Medicine,’ is a bold, celebratory show across all three major galleries within GIANT. Featuring works by major international artists such as Jake and Dinos Chapman, Jim Lambie and Gavin Turk, it takes an optimistic, humorous and entertaining approach in demonstrating the utility art has to re-unite societal ties in public space.

Artist's Piss

Corpus Domini

COME WHAT MAY

BIG MEDICINE