Rote Tür (Red Door) (2025) is an oil painting by Gavin Turk that presents a familiar architectural form – a door left slightly ajar, its solid frame rendered with convincing precision. Beyond it, however, lies no recognisable interior or exterior. Instead, the narrow aperture opens onto a luminous field of paint interrupted by a horizon line, suspended somewhere between landscape, atmosphere, and pure optical effect. The painting draws the viewer towards this opening, offering the promise of depth while continually frustrating any stable sense of space.

Throughout his practice, Turk has returned to ordinary objects invested with symbolic weight. The door, like the egg that recurs elsewhere in his work, embodies paradox. It marks beginnings and endings simultaneously, defining the unstable relationship between inside and outside. Turk has remarked on the visual and conceptual slippage between the two forms and notes “When I see a door in a doorframe, I also see an egg. An egg is all door, in that sense, the door is both a point of departure and arrival.”

Rote Tür is informed by an engagement with art history. Renaissance theories of painting as a window onto the world are echoed, while Surrealist explorations of psychological thresholds linger at the edges of the composition. The work recalls the uncanny domestic spaces of René Magritte and the suspended, metaphysical calm of Giorgio de Chirico. It also resonates with Marcel Duchamp’s Door, 11 rue Larrey (1927), a single door caught in a permanent state of contradiction, both open and closed at once. Turk’s meticulous trompe l’oeil technique invites comparison with Gerhard Richter’s Tür paintings from 1967, and the title pointedly echoes Richter’s own. Richter borrowed the authority of photography to destabilise it, constructing images that looked factual while remaining fundamentally invented. Turk extends this enquiry. Rather than asking what is real, Rote Tür asks why images are believed. The painting offers no passage beyond itself, only the illusion of one, directing attention back to the viewer’s own expectations and habits of perception.

This concern aligns Turk with a longer philosophical lineage. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793), William Blake proposed that human perception limits reality rather than reveals it, a notion later reframed by Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception (1954). Turk’s door does not open onto truth or transcendence, but onto the unstable mechanics of seeing.

Rote Tür holds the viewer at the threshold, caught between belief and doubt, presence and absence. Meaning is not located beyond the opening, but in the uneasy experience of standing before it, aware of the desire to enter and the impossibility of doing so. The work insists on hesitation, reminding us that perception itself is provisional, and that what lies beyond the frame remains perpetually out of reach.