Gavin Turk: The Escapologist

Ben Brown Fine Arts is pleased to present The Escapologist, the sixth solo exhibition of British artist Gavin Turk at the London gallery. The exhibition showcases a new series of oil paintings depicting doors left ajar, each offering a glimpse into an ambiguous and surreal terrain beyond. Shown together, the works transform the gallery into a labyrinth of thresholds. Each painting functions as a portal, drawing the viewer towards a narrow opening that reveals a field of smooth, liquid brushwork. These passages dissolve into bands of luminous colour that suggest an atmospheric horizon, generating unstable optical effects that coax the eye into a false sense of depth.

For more than three decades, Turk has relentlessly interrogated the systems through which belief is produced – in images, in authorship, in value – using familiar forms, art historical tropes, psychoanalytic symbols and dreamlike objects to set perceptual traps. The door is a recurring motif in his practice and, like the egg that also appears throughout his work, carries both Surrealist symbolism and art historical weight. As Turk 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.” A ubiquitous object, the door embodies paradox. It marks both beginnings and endings and defines the unstable relationship between inside and outside.