Gavin Turk

Gavin Turk
Photograph by Pete Millson, 2 July 2001
Born	1967 (age 49–50) Guildford, England
Website	http://www.gavinturk.com

Gavin Turk (born 1967) is a British artist, and is considered to be one of the Young British Artists. Turk’s oeuvre deals with issues of authenticity and identity, engaged with modernist and avant-garde debates surrounding the ‘myth’ of the artist and the ‘authorship’ of a work of art.

Turk studied at Chelsea School of Art from 1986 - 1989, and at the Royal College of Art from 1989 - 1991.

In 1991, tutors at the Royal College of Art refused to present Gavin Turk with his postgraduate degree, a decision based on his graduation exhibition. Titled Cave, it consisted of a whitewashed studio space, containing a blue heritage plaque (of the kind normally found on historic buildings) commemorating his own presence as a sculptor, stating "Gavin Turk worked here, 1989-1991". This bestowed some instant notoriety on Turk, whose work was collected by numerous collectors including Charles Saatchi, who later exhibited Turk's work in the exhibition Sensation (art exhibition), which toured London (Royal Academy of Arts), Berlin (Hamburger Bahnhof) and New York (Brooklyn Museum). Turk attended the private view of the Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy, dressed as a down-and-out.

He has subsequently produced an extensive body of work, which purports to question the value and integrity of a hermetic artistic identity.

Turk's wide ranging practice often incorporates iconic images of figures taken from popular culture and art historical sources. A series of detailed life-sized waxworks, incorporating the artists own appearance, features the artist assuming various poses as different characters, including Sid Vicious, Jean-Paul Marat and the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara. Turk's most famous work in this series, Pop (1993) is a waxwork of Turk as Sid Vicious. The work appropriates the stance of Andy Warhol's screen print of Elvis Presley. In the work, the right hand is pointing a gun, a motif which recurs in other works in the series, such as Bum (1998).