| Description |
Richly illustrated (64 pages) with essay 'The Philosophical Artist' by Deborah Curtis
An exclusive exhibition catalogue featuring all of the neon works in the show at The Bowes Museum, Turk's first solo exhibition of neons, curated by Greville Worthington, former Turner Prize judge, including an introductory essay by Gavin Turk’s wife, Deborah Curtis.
Born in 1967, one of the Young British Artists, Gavin Turk has pioneered many forms of contemporary British sculpture, including painted bronze, waxwork, recycled art-historical icon and use of rubbish in art. 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 ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp.
The title of the exhibition, Seven Billion Two Hundred and One Million Nine Hundred and Sixty-Four Thousand and Two Hundred and Thirty-Eight reflects Turk’s fascination with world population and, calculating the number of people alive the moment his first solo show opened at The Bowes Museum, inspired him to create the largest neon work of his career to date. ‘We are One’, is an eight and a half metre wide piece designed to broadcast the world’s population from the Museum’s French façade for the duration of the exhibition. Whilst, inside the exhibition another of Turk’s new works for the show, presents the size of the human race a notional 25 minutes after the larger neon on the Museum exterior. |