Gavin Turk’s appropriation art is on display in Belgium at the Knokke branch of the Jablonka Maruani Mercier Gallery. The exhibition, entitled “Gavin Turk - GT,” runs through September 15.Among the works on display — which include film, bronze sculptures disguised as found objects, performance art, and two motorcycles — are a number of pieces that take a typically Turk-ian view of the work of Andy Warhol and Lucio Fontana. Turk takes on the former in images that reference Warhol's “Elvis,” his 1986 “Self-Portrait with Fright Wig” series, his series of “Screen Test” films, and his “Oxidation Paintings,” in which Warhol urinated onto prepared copper sheets. In works such as “Fright Wig Piss,” 2014, Turk confuses issues of authorship and intent even further by combining the “Self Portraits” and “Oxidations” together, this time replicating the effects of the urine using another typical Warhol medium — the silkscreen.In another series of works, from which the exhibition takes its name, Turk presents his take on Lucio Fontana’s perforated egg-shaped paintings “La fine di Dio (The End of God).” Named “Holy Egg,” the holes on Turk’s work are formed in the shape of the initials “GT,” with the message clear: following Fontana’s “End of God,” it is the self, or perhaps the celebrity artist ego, which has replaced it.These are joined by a number of works both original and appropriated, including a series of bronze sculptures painted to look like “Found Object” trash bags, a site-specific recreation of a Fontana performance re-performed in its original location, and, to quote from a press release, “two bikes ‘de Bois Rond’ [that] the audience will be able to ride [...] in return for a signed certificate from the artist, declaring the rider a work of art.”“Gavin Turk - GT” runs through September 15 at Jablonka Maruani Mercier Gallery Knokke.
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