Alan Turner: I wanted to make things that were ordinary extraordinary

Sadie Coles HQ presents an exhibition of paintings by the American artist Alan Turner (1943-2020).

I wanted to make things that were ordinary extraordinary is a new exhibition of paintings by the late American artist Alan Turner (1943-2020). Bringing together eight canvasses, the exhibition explores the artist’s idiosyncratic and surreal depictions of the body made during the late 1980s and marks the first solo presentation of his work in the UK in almost four decades.

Turner first achieved recognition in the late 1970s, having spent four years in London between 1968 and 1972; he went on to pursue an idiosyncratic path for half a century, creating work that was consistently “at the edge, if not out of bounds” in relation to figurative art. The exhibition features eight paintings dating from a fertile phase in his career – the years 1986-1990 – during which he focused on the body as a doubly recognisable and reconfigurable entity. In these works, a fascination for fleshly naturalism combines with an affinity for the illogical, the awry and the aberrant.