Balancing blue biscuit after Man Ray, mix media, 2018
British artist Gavin Turk has pioneered many forms of contemporary sculpture including the painted bronze, the waxwork, the recycled art-historical icon, and the use of rubbish in art. What is real and what is a copy looks central in Turk’s work, as well as his interest for branding and advertising. Turk’s signature is ever-present in his work, ’a found object’ he considers as a material. An artist working with iconic images, he is also interested in the processes that transform a person into an icon, topic explored through those works in which he appears as another artist – as Yves Klein, as Manzoni, as Fontana, and as Jackson Pollock. At the core of Turk’s practice are issues of authorship, authenticity, and artist myth in direct line with avant-garde debate started by Marcel Duchamp. Turk rose to prominence in the early 1990s during the so-called 'young British artists' phenomenon: a wave of media interest provoked by an ambitious generation of artists with a flair for self-promotion.