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More than a decade after his YBA days, Gavin Turk’s inaugural exhibition “L’Amour Fou” (on view through March 30 at David Nolan Gallery in New York) is a pensive, compact installation of photographs, videos, sculptures and automatic drawings that center around the white transit van, a symbol of the decaying British working class.
In the first part of the gallery, Turk dissects, reproduces, and records automotive components; yet, their familiarity does not diminish their impact. Severed, half-breathing exhaust pipes cast in bronze recline in vitrines, canopied by photographs of exhaust smoke.
The second gallery presents a series of “exhaust drawings,” blossoming supernovas created by blocking exhaust emission with watercolor paper. The only glimpse of a fully assembled vehicle in “L’Amour Fou” is a van Turk reduced to a 3-foot tall cube, installed in a blank room that seems to sustain the crushing pressure from the compression machine. “It’s the detritus, it’s post-car, the car’s gone. How the car is and how it functions tell us a lot about ourselves. It’s like a forensic investigation – you take someone’s rubbish and go through it, you get a good idea of what they keep and can draw up quite a good character profile. Some things are defined by the opposite,” said Turk.
We spoke with Turk about his process and subject matter.
Read the full interview by clicking through to the PDF: