We interview British artist Gavin Turk, whose show ‘Kerze’ at Ben Brown Fine Arts is an ode to Gerhard Richter, with an uncanny twist
It’s been 25 years since ‘Sensation’, the 1997 landmark Royal Academy show in London that rattled the very fabric of art as we knew it. Everything was controversial, everything stirred the senses, and nothing, in British art at least, has been the same since.
One artist in the nucleus of this melting pot was Gavin Turk, a key protagonist of the YBAs (Young British Artists). Turk’s subversive visual identity has long been defined by ‘quoting’ ingredients from other artists or sources and fusing them with his own. The resulting recipe is a provocative blend that questions core notions of authorship and value. ‘My art is always other people's art,’ he says. ‘But I'd also say that the inevitability of contemporary art is that it's always a self-portrait as well.’
