Newport Street Gallery is planning an exhibition devoted to Gavin Turk. The show, titled Who What When Where How and Why (23 November-19 March 2017), will include around 30 years worth of works, all of which are drawn from the collection of the artist Damien Hirst, the gallery's founder. One highlight is Cave (1991), which was the sole work in Turk's 1991 graduating exhibition at the Royal College of Art. The work is a blue plaque simply declaring that the artist had "worked here" from 1989 to 1991. It was originally presented in his former studio.
Hirst began collecting Turk's work in 1998, after first encountering it at the Royal College of Art exhibition in 1991. In a statement, Hirst says: “I started collecting Gavin’s work 20 years ago. He’s an incredibly powerful artist, his work is about language and the spaces between things—about identity and being somebody and nobody, he plays with our preconceptions of what’s there and not there, of what art is and how it functions. He’s had a major impact on British art so it’s great to be able to show such an extensive collection of his work at Newport Street.”
It is the third exhibition at the gallery, which opened in October 2015 with a show of works by John Hoyland, also drawn entirely from Hirst's collection. An exhibition of works by Jeff Koons is on show until 16 October.
