LONDON.- Set to be a standout exhibition in London in 2027, Gavin Turk’s intervention at Sir John Soane’s Museum brings one of Britain’s leading contemporary artists into dialogue with one of London’s most extraordinary museums, uncovering new stories of collecting, value and memory.
Renowned for transforming overlooked and discarded objects into meticulously crafted works of art, Turk, once described as ‘art’s king of trash’, uses hand-painted bronzes, paintings and trompe l’oeil sculptures to challenge how we assign value. His playful interventions, featuring found objects and recreations of everyday waste, inspire us to reconsider our own perspectives towards consumption.
The exhibition finds a natural home at Sir John Soane’s Museum, where Turk enters into conversation with both the building and its often-overlooked Building Archive. Spanning 1837 to the present, the Archive preserves traces of everyday Museum life - from a George III halfpenny found in dust in the Strong Closet in 2025, a quill perhaps dropped into a drawer by one of Soane’s students, and a set of buttons passed down from one Head Porter to another - providing evidence of the people who have lived, worked in and cared for the Museum.
Responding directly to the building’s history, Turk will create new works, including teazels and a crow, which will be dotted around the Museum, camouflaged among the permanent collection. In The Foyle Space, a major sculptural installation titled Looking Glass takes the form of a dichroic glass cube. This is filled with detritus from Turk’s studio, a vision of waste, reframed as a relic, echoing the debris-filled time capsule left by Sir John Soane in his private bathtub which contained false teeth, receipts and broken glass.
Upstairs in the Exhibition Galleries, a selection of objects from the Building Archive will be on display, co-curated by Turk and Deputy Director and Inspectress of Sir John Soane’s Museum, Helen Dorey, who has cared for the Museum for the past forty years. Together, the new and archival objects will transform the Museum into a living conversation between history and the present, inviting visitors to consider collecting as an act of storytelling and preservation.
The exhibition will run from 14 July 2027 – 16 January 2028.
Gavin Turk says: “The building archive has introduced me to important piles of dust, which brings me to contemplate the metaphysical nature of dust. Dust is a metaphor for time itself. I see this as an opportunity to reveal and reframe the museum’s hidden narratives, through the act of care and curation.”
Gavin Turk (b. 1967, Guildford, Surrey) is a conceptual artist whose work interrogates ideas of authenticity, authorship and the ‘myth’ of the artist. Drawing on Surrealist methodologies, his practice is self-reflexive and often knowingly parodic, questioning the art world’s value systems and the construction of the artist’s persona. Turk came to prominence with his postgraduate degree show at the Royal College of Art where he presented Cave (1991): an empty, whitewashed room bearing a blue heritage plaque inscribed with his own name. The installation announced a sceptical, postmodern view of artistic status and reputation, establishing the use of his name as a recurring device within his practice. It brought Turk immediate notoriety following the attention of Charles Saatchi and led to his association with the generation of Young British Artists (YBAs). Since then, Turk has developed a wide-ranging body of work that examines the cultural and economic frameworks surrounding art and its makers. He frequently reconfigures the visual languages of artists who precede him, using art history as material through which questions of originality, influence and inheritance are explored. Working across sculpture, painting, photography, and print, Turk has pioneered approaches now familiar within British contemporary art, including painted bronze, waxwork, art-historical appropriation, and the use of discarded materials.
Turk studied at the Chelsea School of Art (1986 -1989) and the Royal College of Art (1989-1991), both in London. Turk’s work is held in numerous public collections worldwide, including the Tate, London; Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, NY; Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK), Frankfurt; Saatchi Gallery, London; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA), CA; Musée Magritte, Brussels; British Council, London; and the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), London.
