Gavin Turk’s “The Escapologist” at Ben Brown Fine Arts, London
What Lies Beyond the Door?
11 March – 22 May 2026 | Ben Brown Fine Arts, Mayfair
Gavin Turk features heavily in the Colstoun Arts Collection, his work continues to ask the same fundamental question in a hundred different ways: what does it mean to look at something, and what do we bring to the act of looking? From his early wax self-portraits and bin bags cast in bronze to his ongoing engagement with the traditions of pop art, conceptualism, and trompe l’oeil, Turk has consistently worked in the space between image and idea, surface and depth — making art that is deceptively simple to encounter and genuinely rewarding to think about. When I was asked recently by a curator about why I love his work, I said simply that he has helped me understand more about contemporary art through his works than years of art history lectures, in short, Turk’s work has taught me what to look for in art.
His new show at Ben Brown Fine Arts, The Escapologist, is his sixth solo with the gallery and runs in London until 22 May. It centres on a singular, deceptively humble motif: a door, left slightly ajar. This in itself isn’t a new topic for turk, if you know his work you may remember L'Âge d'Or (Green) from 2012.
L'Âge d'Or (Green) - Painted Bronze H3620 x W1550 x D1500 mm 2012. Image from the artist’s website
The Exhibition
The works in The Escapologist are a series of trompe l’oeil paintings of doors in their frames — each door half-open, each frame extending to the edge of the canvas, each painting hung low on the wall so that it occupies the same physical space as a real door might. The effect is quietly uncanny: you find yourself hesitating, your eye momentarily uncertain about what it’s seeing, even more so when the gallery is full of these half open doors. Behind each door, a gradient background alludes to different kinds of space — sometimes exterior, sometimes interior, always ambiguous.
The title is characteristically Turk. “The Escapologist”. The title suggests a missing figure: “someone who has either left or is about to appear.” The implied absence is the whole point. The canvas is a portrait canvas — but there is no portrait. Instead there is a threshold, and the invitation to imagine what lies beyond it.
Door (with crystal handle) - Oil on linen, 225cm x 100 cm, 2026. Copyright The Artist image from Ben Brown Fine Art’s website
A Threshold Between States
What makes these paintings so compelling is the way they hold two things in tension at once. A door left ajar is simultaneously an obstruction and an invitation — it stops you and beckons you in the same moment. Turk traces the conceptual underpinnings of this series through Gerhard Richter’s flat, muted white door paintings from the 1960s, through Magritte’s use of the door as surrealist metaphor, and through Marcel Duchamp’s remarkable Door, 11 Rue Larrey (1927) — a door in Duchamp’s own apartment engineered to occupy two frames simultaneously, always both open and closed. These three artists, and themes are common art historical reference points for Turk who explores thresholds again, and again, in the form of staircases like his 2020 work ‘Naked Staircase’, windows, doorways, eggs and art historical framing, the artist asks the viewer to pass through the image to a new paradigm
Turk is careful to note that these art historical connections are not prerequisites for engagement with the work. He argues, convincingly, that these references are already embedded in the visual culture around us — in billboards, films, fashion — absorbed long before we consciously register them. You don’t need a degree in art history to feel the pull of a door left open. The sensation is older and more instinctive than that, and for me this is the allure of his work.
Why It’s Worth Seeing
There is something genuinely rare about an artist working at the highest level for over thirty years who continues to produce work that feels urgent and alive. The Escapologist arrives at a moment when questions about thresholds — between past and future, between what we can control and what we cannot — feel particularly charged, no matter if it is global politics, VR or AI the current climate of the world many people are keen to escape in a literal or emotional sense.
It’s also, on a purely visual level, a beautiful show to spend time with. The trompe l’oeil works reward close attention: the closer you look, the more the surface gives back, and the stranger the sensation becomes of standing before an image that quietly, insistently, wants you to step through it.
If you’re in London between now and late May, this exhibition is well worth visiting, if you can attend a quiet time of day the power of all of these doors around Ben Brown’s sub-ground gallery just off Bond Street will be an extremely powerful experience.
Gavin Turk: The Escapologist
Ben Brown Fine Arts, 12 Brook’s Mews, Mayfair, London W1K 4DG
11 March – 22 May 2026 | Free entry
