Exhibitions2026The Last Supper

Mimmo Scognamiglio presents The Last Supper by Gavin Turk. The artist presents a series of fading flowers, discarded vessels and used quotidian packaging that sits balanced between presence and disappearance. Flowers glitch in and out of perspective, through layers of paint, appearing to dissolve into the canvas, appearing less as objects than as memories of objects. Left beyond their moment of display, they become reminders of times passage and the fragility of value itself. 

At the centre of the exhibition is a monumental painting of discarded consumer packaging, collected by the artist, and arranged before creating a time capsule on the canvas. The composition echoes The Last Supper, replacing the figures with the remnants of contemporary consumption. 

The exhibition and works incorporated draw upon the thinking of Walter Benjamin and his notion of the dialectical image, where past and present collide in a moment of recognition. Religious imagery, art history and consumer culture converge, ruins of the past and ruins of the future, are apparent and always in the forefront of the artists mind – inviting reflection on what contemporary society chooses to value. 

In a separate room Artist’s Piss a work from 2021, in which artist canned his own piss plays homage to Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’Artista (1961), in which Manzoni tined his own shit and priced it at the market value of Gold, Turk canning his own urine valued his at the price of silver, the artist is the contemporary alchemist, creating order out of ordure.

The artist states ‘value is a paradox, you are drawn to objects or moments in time through their cultural value or through their assumed value, I am interested in posing the question what is it that you value? And why?’