Current Review(s)
'The Mirror Stage'
Gavin Turk at Goodman GalleryThis summer, Gavin Turk showed for the first time in South Africa with a big shiny exhibition titled ‘The Mirror Stage’ at the Goodman Gallery. It was literally dazzling. Taking Andy Warhol’s infamous New York City studio, the ‘Factory’ as its structural premise, Turk had the entire gallery wallpapered from floor to ceiling in silver tinfoil. Against this, a selection of his recent paintings, screen prints and sculptural pieces sat in an aura of slightly tacky sixties nostalgia, directly keying into Turk’s obsessive allusion to art history, and his interest in themes like authorship, authenticity, value, commodity and the myth of the artist.
As one of the YBAs who came to prominence in the nineties, Gavin Turk is famous, or infamous, for many things, not least for his auspicious failing of his MA at the Royal College of Art. Much, of course, has been said about Gavin Turk and Gavin Turk’s work, and it is sometimes hard to say new things about big famous people, especially when the work of the artist in question is all about being big and famous, and how one says something new, or doesn’t.
So to say that Gavin Turk’s exhibition at Goodman Gallery is nothing new then, would be, in a sense, to state the obvious. Largely in the same way that Gavin Turk does. This is not to say that the work is simple, however. Gavin Turk’s simplicity is too obvious to be simple, too complicated in the way that it seems not to try. Without fail, the work engages in a kind of irreverent double action. It is both obvious and underhanded, seeming to be one thing, and yet revealing itself as another. It employs camouflage as both strategy and visual device in a variety of ways that sees the viewer continually deflected away from the work. I went to Turk’s walkabout of the exhibition to hear what he had to say.
19 December 2009 - 16 January 2010
Listings(s)
'The Mirror Stage'
Gavin Turk at Goodman GalleryGoodman Gallery Cape Town presents the first solo exhibition in South Africa by internationally acclaimed artist Gavin Turk. For his exhibition, Turk will create an installation based on Andy Warhol’s Factory, the artist's infamous original New York studio, thereby extending his concerns with issues of authorship, authenticity, identity and the myth of the artist. On show will be a selection of recent paintings, including works based on Warhol’s urine oxidation paintings, as well as large-scale silkscreens and sculptural pieces. These will be exhibited against a wallpaper backdrop of silver foil which will cover the entire gallery.
19 December 2009 - 16 January 2010
