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Artist: Gavin Turk

Ben Brown Fine Arts Hong Kong presents Betwixt, an exhibition of paintings and sculpture by British artist Gavin Turk. Bringing together several distinct bodies of work, the exhibition is grounded in what Turk calls “domestic anthropology”, which he describes as “the exploration of the domestic, with the question of value, and the act of re-noticing”.

The title comes from the archaic English word ‘betwixt’, which evokes being caught between two conditions – a state Turk has explored for more than three decades through his interrogation of authorship, value and belief.

Works in the exhibition explore liminality, poised between presence and absence, arrival and departure. The paintings on view are familiar and comforting, yet quietly unsettling, each capturing the moment just after something has happened – a candle extinguished, a door left ajar, a selection of quotidian objects arranged on a tabletop. We feel we have seen them before, and yet something has shifted. Here, the domestic reveals itself as the original site of the uncanny – the unheimlich, literally the ‘unhomely’ – where our most familiar surroundings are those most capable of estrangement.

The works share a common structure – a recognisable motif, borrowed from art history or everyday life, is subtly destabilised until it becomes less a fixed image than a threshold. In this, they recall René Magritte’s Surrealist depiction of everyday objects.

Each series finds its point of departure in art history. In KERZE (German for ‘candle’), Turk appropriates Gerhard Richter’s celebrated photorealistic candle paintings. The still lifes echo the framing and atmosphere of Giorgio Morandi’s work, yet their subjects are resolutely contemporary, assembling discarded household packaging, which the artist’s elevates by rendering in oil paint. Turk’s new series of life-size door paintings, meanwhile, take their titles from his artist predecessors – Richter once more, alongside Marcel Duchamp, Vilhelm Hammershøi and Giorgio de Chirico – and each door has its own atmospheric character, conjured through Turk’s use of colour.

American Bag (2015) is a bronze cast of a full black bin liner, painted in trompe l’œil so that it passes convincingly for the real thing. Where Duchamp’s readymade promoted a found object to the status of art, Turk reverses the process, devoting the time, skill and expense of bronze casting, a medium historically reserved for monuments and public statuary, to the most disposable of everyday objects. In Pistoletto’s Trash (2019), the motif enters into dialogue with Michelangelo Pistoletto’s quadri specchianti (mirror paintings), bringing Arte Povera’s attention to humble materials and the active participation of the viewer into conversation with Turk’s own sustained questioning of what makes an object art.

The works on view in Betwixt invite viewers to pause at the threshold between the familiar and the strange. Moving between homage and appropriation, the art-historical and the everyday, Turk turns the most ordinary things – a door, a candle, a piece of discarded packaging – into an occasion for what he calls “re-noticing”. To look again at what we thought we already knew is to find the world around us transformed, and to see it anew.

Gavin Turk (b. 1967, Guildford, Surrey) is a conceptual artist whose work interrogates ideas of authenticity, authorship and the ‘myth’ of the artist. Drawing on Surrealist methodologies, his practice is self-reflexive and often knowingly parodic, questioning the art world’s value systems and the construction of the artist’s persona. Turk studied at the Chelsea School of Art (1986 -1989) and the Royal College of Art (1989-1991), both in London. Turk’s work is held in numerous public collections worldwide, including the Tate, London; Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, NY; Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK), Frankfurt; Saatchi Gallery, London; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA), CA; Musée Magritte, Brussels; British Council, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), London.

all images © the gallery and the artist(s)