Set to be a standout exhibition in London in 2027, Gavin Turk’s intervention at Sir John Soane’s Museum brings one of Britain’s leading contemporary artists into dialogue with one of London’s most extraordinary museums, uncovering new stories of collecting, value and memory.Renowned for transforming overlooked and discarded objects into meticulously crafted works of art, Turk, once described as ‘art’s king of trash’, uses hand-painted bronzes, paintings and trompe l’oeil sculptures to challenge how we assign value. His playful interventions, featuring found objects and recreations of everyday waste, inspire us to reconsider our own perspectives towards consumption.The exhibition finds a natural home at Sir John Soane’s Museum, where Turk enters into conversation with both the building, collection and its often-overlooked Building Archive. Spanning 1837 to the present, the Archive preserves traces of everyday Museum life - from a George III halfpenny found in dust in the Strong Closet in 2025, a quill perhaps dropped into a drawer by one of Soane’s students, and a set of buttons passed down from one Head Porter to another - providing evidence of the people who have lived, worked in and cared for the Museum.Responding directly to the building’s history, Turk will create new works, including teazels and a crow, which will be dotted around the Museum, camouflaged among the permanent collection. In The Foyle Space, a major sculptural installation titled Looking Glass takes the form of a dichroic glass cube. This is filled with detritus from Turk’s studio, a vision of waste, reframed as a relic, echoing the debris-filled time capsule left by Sir John Soane in his private bathtub which contained false teeth, receipts and broken glass.Upstairs in the Exhibition Galleries, a selection of objects from the Building Archive will be on display, co-curated by Turk and Deputy Director and Inspectress of Sir John Soane’s Museum, Helen Dorey, who has cared for the Museum for the past forty years. Together, the new and archival objects will transform the Museum into a living conversation between history and the present, inviting visitors to consider collecting as an act of storytelling and preservation.

Set to be a standout exhibition in London in 2027, Gavin Turk’s intervention at Sir John Soane’s Museum brings one of Britain’s leading contemporary artists into dialogue with one of London’s most extraordinary museums, uncovering new stories of collecting, value and memory.

Gavin Turk Exhibition Announced 2027

This October, Gavin Turk will present across Frieze London, Frieze Masters, and a series of Frieze week related events in London.&nbsp;At Frieze London, Turk will be represented on the Galeries Krinzinger (Booth A12), presenting two works, <a href="https://www.gavinturk.com/artworks/2013/argon-candle">Argon Candle</a> &amp; <a href="https://www.gavinturk.com/artworks/2019/pistolettos-used-tea-cup-bite-marks">Pistoletto's Bitten Cup</a>. At Frieze Masters, Ben Brown Fine Arts (Booth E13) will show an early work entitled G.T.E.G.G.&nbsp;As part of Frieze Week, programming, Turk will join Kate Spicer for a live conversation at <a href="https://www.theroofgardens.com/">Kensington Roof Gardens</a>, titled 'Don't Look Back: Art, Media and Myth in the 90's'. Together they revisit a decade when art, journalism and celebrity collided, from YBAs to tabloid takedowns, the glamour of the party scene to the grit of counterculture.&nbsp;Turk is also featured in 'Dreaming Together' at <a href="https://www.frieze.com/event/london-launch-party-dreaming-together-groucho-club">The Groucho Club</a>, a collaboration with Bompas &amp; Parr, exploring sleep, art and the subconscious. The project includes Turk's contribution to a collective 'dream menu' and a DJ set at the launch.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.frieze.com/fairs/frieze-london-frieze-masters">Frieze London and Frieze Masters </a>take place from 15th - 19th October 2025, in The Regents Park, London.&nbsp;

G.T.E.G.G, 1997 

This October, Gavin Turk will present across Frieze London, Frieze Masters, and a series of Frieze week related events in London. At Frieze London, Turk will be represented on the Galeries Krinzinger (Booth A12), presenting two works, Argon Candle & Pistoletto's Bitten Cup. At Frieze Masters, Ben Brown Fine Arts (Booth E13) will show an early work entitled G.T.E.G.G. 

Gavin Turk at Frieze London, Frieze Masters and Frieze Week Projects 

Maisie Lillywhite, BBC News, Gloucestershire &amp; Alice Bouverie, BBC News, Gloucestershire,The works of more than 50 sculptors are being featured in a trail 100ft (30m) beneath the ground in caves this summer.Back to the Cave – The Full Spectrum, opened at Clearwell Caves in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire on 23 May.Seventy modern and contemporary artworks, including pieces by Damien Hirst and Lynn Chadwick, are dotted along the 1800ft-long (500m) trail.Ochre paint pigment has been mined from the natural cave system near Coleford for at least 5,000 years – providing inspiration to organisers to use it as a space for art.Ochre paint pigment has been mined from the natural cave system near Coleford for at least 5,000 years – providing inspiration to organisers to use it as a space for art.As visitors get deeper into the caves, the colours in the exhibition become more vibrant. Colin Reid from Stroud, a glass artist, created a bright red hoop that glows in the dark. "I was so chuffed to see it but I'm pleased with the colour and the form in this setting, so that you can look through the piece and the cave goes on behind," he said.Rungwe Kingdon, a co-creator of the exhibition, said putting the art in the caves created "childlike wonder"."However well-known the art is, it makes it very accessible in the sense that it makes it into an adventure," he said.Clearwell Caves are part of a Natural England-designated Site of Special Scientific Interest and the Wye Valley Special Area of Conservation due to the large number of lesser horseshoe bats.The caves have been used as a filming location for TV shows including Doctor Who, The Winter King and Merlin.Read full piece by clicking <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgq335gp951o">here</a>.&nbsp;&nbsp;

BBC Article 

Maisie Lillywhite, BBC News, Gloucestershire & Alice Bouverie, BBC News, Gloucestershire,The works of more than 50 sculptors are being featured in a trail 100ft (30m) beneath the ground in caves this summer.Back to the Cave – The Full Spectrum, opened at Clearwell Caves in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire on 23 May.Seventy modern and contemporary artworks, including pieces by Damien Hirst and Lynn Chadwick, are dotted along the 1800ft-long (500m) trail.

Sculpture trail that's 100ft below the ground

Gavin Turk subverts still-life painting and says: ‘We are what we throw away’In his new series of paintings, British artist Gavin Turk presents arrangements of domestic and commercial packaging. Displayed against monochrome backgrounds, flattening the depth of field, the objects jostle for space and attention, the bright oranges, blues and highlighter-yellows of manufactured plastic countering the muted earth- and stone-tones of cardboard, jars, and eggboxes.&nbsp;While these paintings affirm the artist’s enduring interest in consumer waste – the subject of his famous Bag (2000), a bronze sculpture resembling a black bin liner, bulging with rubbish, as well as recent watercolours of single-use plastic bottles – ‘The Conspiracy of Blindness’ also engages with the work of Italian artist Giorgio Morandi, best known for his own paintings of sleekly formed domestic objects.&nbsp;(‘My art is always other people's art,’ <a href="https://www.wallpaper.com/art/gavin-turk-interview-kerze-london">Turk told us in a 2023 interview</a>, of his approach of referencing other artists in his work.)<h2 id="gavin-turk-x2018-we-are-what-we-throw-away-x2019-3">Gavin Turk: ‘We are what we throw away’</h2>‘One can travel this world and see nothing,’ said Morandi. ‘To achieve understanding it is necessary not to see many things, but to look hard at what you do see.’ Echoing the restricted palette and distinctive stillness of Morandi’s work, Turk’s paintings encourage us to ‘look hard’ at the objects furnishing our lives, brought into homes, often then buried in landfill.&nbsp;In Turk’s hands, these accumulated objects acquire a sense of abstraction. Stripped of their identifying marks and labels, removed from their original contexts, the pure form of each bottle, box, or carton is permitted to take centre stage, at once recognisable and strangely defamiliarised, beautiful and oddly alien. Begun as an attempt to catalogue his own encounters with disposable packaging – what he has termed ‘an exercise in self-portraiture’ – Turk’s paintings confront our habits of consumerism and the global ramifications of the products that surround us.&nbsp;The titles of each painting offer an index, both honest and exposing, of the items on display, restoring brand names and identities, as in the ‘Thai Dragon Siracha Hot Chilli Sauce’ and ‘Scala Vegan Basil Pesto’ of one canvas, or the tubs of ‘Delphi Foods Humous’ and boxes of ‘Maldon Sea Salt Flakes’ that recur in several paintings.&nbsp;It is as though Turk’s series mounts a two-part challenge to the viewer: What would these paintings show if they were yours? Would you be happy to display them in a gallery in London? The work is reminiscent of Michael Landy’s installation, Break Down (2000), which saw the artist offer up his personal belongings (7,226 items) for systematic destruction, dismantled by a team of workers along a conveyer belt, an inverted production line.&nbsp;Turk’s paintings subvert the conventions of traditional still-life painting. Where the lavish spreads of shellfish, fruits, and perishable flowers of 17th-century Dutch still life imply the inevitable rotting and disintegration of their contents, Turk’s plastic bottles and containers don’t so easily suggest a set of objects on the cusp of vanishing&nbsp;On the contrary, it seems almost possible that Turk’s paintings won’t outlive the very objects they depict, that his bottles of ‘Squeeze It Orange Drink’ may still be here long after we have disappeared. Turk’s new paintings confront us, boldly, with this legacy. As he so bluntly puts it: ‘We are what we throw away.’&nbsp;Gavin Turk, ‘The Conspiracy of Blindness’ is at Ben Brown Fine Arts from 15 March – 10 May 2024Full article can be read <a href="https://www.wallpaper.com/art/exhibitions-shows/gavin-turk-still-life-paintings-conspiracy-of-blindness-ben-brown-fine-arts-london">here</a>.&nbsp;

Gavin Turk Maldon Sea Salt Flakes, Cif Original Cream Cleaner, Morrisons Thick Bleach Lemon, Dr Bronner's Organic 18-in-1 Rose Pure-Castile Soap, Duvel Belgium Strong Blond, Yeo Valley Organic Whole Milk, Farm Shop Organic Free Range Eggs, 2023

Gavin Turk considers wasteful consumer culture in ‘The Conspiracy of Blindness’ at Ben Brown Fine Arts, London

Gavin Turk subverts still-life painting and says: ‘We are what we throw away’In his new series of paintings, British artist Gavin Turk presents arrangements of domestic and commercial packaging. Displayed against monochrome backgrounds, flattening the depth of field, the objects jostle for space and attention, the bright oranges, blues and highlighter-yellows of manufactured plastic countering the muted earth- and stone-tones of cardboard, jars, and eggboxes. 

06.08.2026

Gavin Turk Exhibition Announced 2027