GAVIN TURK ‘The Mirror Stage’ Opening Saturday 19 December 2009 at 10am
Goodman Gallery Cape Town proudly presents the first solo exhibition in South Africa by internationally acclaimed artist Gavin Turk.
Turk’s installations and sculptures deal with issues of authorship, authenticity and identity. Concerned with the ‘myth’ of the artist and the ‘authorship’ of a work, Turk’s engagement with this modernist, avant-garde debate stretches back to the readymades of Marcel Duchamp. In the early 1990s Turk explored issues of authorship and identity by making a number of works based on his own signature that comment on the value that the artist’s name confers onto a work. He has also made a number of photographic and sculptural self-portraits that often involve some degree of disguise. One of his best-known sculptures, Pop (1993), is a life-size waxwork self-portrait in which he adopts the identity of Sid Vicious singing ‘My Way’ in the pose of Elvis Presley as depicted by Andy Warhol. In more recent works such as Pile (2004), a painted bronze sculpture of a pile of garbage bags, Turk explores the way in which a work of art is conferred with iconic status and value.