In Pistoletto’s Trash (2018), Gavin Turk appropriates Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Mirror Paintings, a series the Italian artist began in 1960. Pistoletto’s mirror works are hybrid objects that collapse painting, sculpture and reality. Using reflective steel surfaces, they draw viewers and the surrounding gallery space into the work as active components.

In Pistoletto’s Trash, Turk replaces the human figures that populate Pistoletto’s compositions with his own recurring bin-bag motif. Turk is an artist known for appropriating not only historical artworks but also their mythologies. By substituting Pistoletto’s figures with the bin bag, he overlays his own artistic identity onto Pistoletto’s legacy, creating a conceptual equation that points to artistic lineage, performative repetition and the ongoing, potentially infinite, progression of artistic ego.

While Pistoletto’s mirrors function as theatrical, metaphysical portals, Turk’s intervention redirects them towards contemporary hyper-consumerism, where waste is elevated to the status of art. Originally associated with themes of homelessness, Turk’s bin bag becomes, within Pistoletto’s framework, a pointed symbol of obsolescence, excess and cultural value. Pistoletto’s Trash ultimately operates like an altarpiece, confronting modern fetishisation, desire and consumption, and implicating both the artwork and the viewer within this spectacle.