An exhibition of works including the new, limited edition art portfolio by Gavin Turk, published by the gallery. Turk’s work traditionally fuses elements of cultural identity with ways of seeing – or not seeing; surprising the viewer with what they think they know and what they presume they have seen. White Van Man engages with these familiar tropes whilst playing with icons of modern art history and contemporary culture in a powerful series of images that presage current and future world events.
We live in dangerous times, from Brexit to the rise of the far-right; the unravelling of generations of political and cultural cooperation and the deliberate decimation of our natural world. Where political terminology includes the infamous threat of ‘crashing out’ of the E.U and the tragedy of the greatest number of transitory ‘migrants’- victims of war and failing economies – in modern history. The nightmarish crashed white transit van is a fitting metaphor for them all.
Presenting initially as ‘abstracts’ rendered in a restrained palette of secondary colours, the works in the portfolio are revealed as a series of repeated photographic images of crashed white transit vans – a recurring theme for Turk since 2010. White Van Man has become part of contemporary folklore: a white male in a battered Ford Transit who delivers goods and services in a post-high street Britain where global logistics have become intertwined with the paranoid fear of being taken advantage of by bureaucrats and by migrating foreigners.
| Duration | 19 September 2018 - 20 October 2018 |
| Times | Monday - Friday 10am- 6pm Saturday 12pm - 6pm |
| Cost | Free |
| Venue | Paul Stolper |
| Address | 31 Museum Street, London, WC1A 1LH |
| Contact | 020 7580 7001 / info@paulstolper.com / www.paulstolper.com |