"The candle is a metaphysical symbol, it is a clock, it is a guide, the lit flame is a burning energetic sprite; extinguishing it creates smoke, an afterlife, a holy ghost, a veil, a messenger." – Gavin Turk

Kerzen (Grün und Grau) (2022) forms part of Gavin Turk’s Kerze series, a group of thirteen paintings based on the candle images of Gerhard Richter, notably Kerze (1983). Turk first encountered Richter’s painting reproduced on the cover of Daydream Nation by Sonic Youth, a context that shaped his early reception of the image.

While Richter’s works depict candles with a lit flame, Turk systematically presents them extinguished. In Kerzen (Grün und Grau), smoke rises from the wick, replacing the source of light. The compositional structure remains close to Richter’s, but the narrative emphasis shifts from illumination to cessation. This alteration reframes the motif within the tradition of memento mori, in which the candle signifies the brevity of life and the passage of time. Turk’s intervention situates the image at the moment immediately after extinction, foregrounding transience rather than duration.

The series continues Turk’s sustained engagement with questions of authorship, originality and artistic identity. By reworking a canonical image of late twentieth-century painting, he both acknowledges and destabilises its authority. The project operates as a dialogue with art history, extending to broader modernist and Surrealist lineages associated with figures such as Fernand Léger and René Magritte.

In this context, the extinguished candle functions as both formal device and symbolic structure. It marks time, absence and mortality, while also asserting Turk’s position within a lineage of repetition and revision.