Easter came early to Somerset House as Gavin Turk unveiled a giant bronze egg on the building’s River Terrace yesterday morning. Oeuvre (Verdrigris)(2018) was wrapped up—Christo style—in white canvas and bound with rope and as Turk slipped the first knot and proceeded to unravel its lengths, he confided that his egg obsession stretched back to 1992. This was the year that Turk, having left college and begun thinking “about how art functioned and what art was for,” took the egg as his personal logo. Since then, this maestro of art-historical appropriation has proceeded to use the egg in multiple incarnations, from Magrittean photo portraits of an egg-headed artist to pierced Fontana-style ovoids and Piero Manzoni-esque boxes of multiple eggshells. “It’s the biggest floating signifier you could find: it’s narrative, figurative and abstract all simultaneously—and highly unoriginal as well—which is complicated but something I can handle,” he says.
