Gavin Turk likes to present work that makes viewers question his seemingly inflated ego, originality, truthfulness, or perhaps even his mental stability. He uses his public persona to look at art career strategies, the seeming desire for celebrity, and the apparent cultivation of notoriety.
Read MoreTurk's cockiness, cavalier recycling of art history, and incessant attention seeking might really get up your nose, even if he is spotlighting the highly competitive but standard marketing processes at work in the international art world. The question arises whether this typically postmodern brazen cheekiness is sufficiently interesting a fulcrum on which to balance a career. Is institutional reflexivity enough to sustain its audience's enthusiasm? However, as a career strategy, for this artist it seems to be working.
Note however that this sort of practice is a genre in itself, Turk being grouped with other similar sensibilities like Elaine Sturtevant, early Mike Glier, and Imants Tillers. While Tillers might have, say, his grids of canvas boards as a trademark means of mixing his multiple sources, with Turk it is his own face that constantly reoccurs in almost all of his quotational projects. That visage is the point. It is a loaded comment on artist personality cults. He rubs it in, never avoiding media attention—but seeking it. He likes to elucidate on himself, counting on charm to hold his audience to the world of Turkian art history.
Significant works by Gavin Turk include Artist's Piss (2021), Font (2006), Camouflage silver and fright wig silver and orange on taupe (2007), Rotten to the Core (2006), Double Beuys (2005), and Self Portrait (Fountain) (2005).
