Q: When is a door not a door?
A: When it is ajar
Gavin Turk knows this joke. He’s now built a whole exhibition around it. The Escapologist is the sixth show Turk has had at Ben Brown Fine Art, which in itself says something about a working relationship that clearly suits both parties. This new series of oil paintings explores doors. All left slightly open. Each one offering a narrow glimpse into something beyond that you can’t quite resolve, a smooth, liquid paint dissolving into atmospheric colour, a suggestion of depth that the eye wants to follow but can’t fully trust. Shown together across the gallery, the effect is genuinely disorienting. You move through the space feeling vaguely like you’re supposed to be somewhere else.
That sense of suspension, of being held at a threshold, is precisely the point. Turk has spent more than thirty years making work about the gap between what we see and what we believe. His practice has always been challenging in the best sense, rooted in Surrealism, fluent in art history, deeply sceptical of the systems that tell us what art is and who gets to make it. The Door, he’s said, has long been a recurring motif for him, up there with the egg. “When I see a door in a doorframe, I also see an egg,” he’s noted. “An egg is all door, in that sense, the door is both a point of departure and arrival.” Which sounds almost too neat as a formulation until you stand in front of one of these paintings and feel the pull of it, the way the image promises something it refuses to deliver.
His art-historical framing is tight and deliberate. Most obviously, these paintings are in dialogue with Gerhard Richter’s Tür series from 1967, in which Richter painted doors with photographic precision — not real doors, exactly, but constructed images that borrowed the authority of the photographic to quietly undermine it. Richter was working at a moment when photography was actively destabilising painting’s claim on the real.
Turk is working in a time when that argument has evaporated. The problem isn’t photography anymore. It’s everything feeds, filters, generated imagery, the whole convincing flood of it. His doors sit inside that condition without announcing it. They just refuse to let you in, which turns out to be a more effective way of making the point than any amount of explicit commentary could manage. We’ve stopped questioning what we see. Turk hasn’t.
Gavin Turk The Escapologist Ben Brown Fine Arts
There are other reference points layered in. The uncanny domestic stillness of Magritte. The metaphysical unease of de Chirico. Duchamp’s Door, 11 rue Larrey — that wonderful, perverse object suspended between two doorways, simultaneously open and closed, resolving nothing. And behind all of it, a longer philosophical thread running from William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, with its argument that human perception limits rather than reveals reality, through to Huxley’s Doors of Perception. These aren’t casual name-drops. The lineage is earned, and Turk wears it lightly.
The exhibition title does real work. An escapologist operates through illusion and misdirection — the trick succeeds because the audience actively wants to be fooled. Turk draws the parallel with deliberate care. “Escapology is the science of escaping,” he has said, “perhaps art and creativity are a form of escape, or a paradigm shift.” His paintings promise passage. They hold you instead. You look for the escape route and find yourself looking harder at the act of looking itself, which is where he wanted you all along.
There’s a personal dimension to this show that the press material gestures toward without quite spelling out. Turk returned to the studio following what’s described as a medical sabbatical — a confrontation with mortality and vulnerability. It’s not the kind of thing that necessarily needs to be unpacked in detail for the work to carry its weight, but it does add a particular register to paintings about thresholds, about the space between one state and another. That these doors are all slightly open — not closed, not thrown wide, but ajar — feels less like a formal decision and more like a lived one. Something is on the other side. You can’t get there yet.
The Escapologist is not a valedictory show, despite the circumstances of its making. It’s too restless for that, too intellectually active. But there is something in these paintings of a reckoning — with images, with belief, with what we do when the way forward isn’t clear, and the Door won’t open any further. The question Turk keeps asking is why we trust what we see. In 2026, standing in a gallery in Mayfair looking at a painted door that goes nowhere, it feels less like an art-world provocation and more like a reasonable response to being alive right now.
GAVIN TURK THE ESCAPOLOGIST 11 March – 22 May 2026 Private view: Tuesday 10 March 6-8 pm Ben Brown Fine Arts 12 Brook’s Mews, London W1K 4DG