A new body of work by British artist Gavin Turk centers on a singular motif: a door, left partially open. Doors are an evocative symbol and motif not only in visual art but literature, psychology, and beyond, and for Turk, they offer a potent starting point for considerations around time, space, and perspective—both physical and philosophical.

Turk burst onto the art scene in the early 1990s as one of the Young British Artists (or YBAs), and his practice over the subsequent decades has come to be recognized for its diverse range of mediums and influences—from pop culture to art history—and his unapologetic approach to challenging (even shocking) subject matter. The use of trompe l’oeil has also appeared regularly in his work, of which his present doorway works are the latest installment.

Turk’s series of door paintings are set to go on view in London at Ben Brown Fine Arts in “The Escapologist,” the artist’s sixth solo with the gallery and on view March 11–May 22, 2026. Ahead of the show’s opening, we reached out to the artist to learn more about what’s in store, and what the conceptual and inspirational underpinnings of this body of work are.

Inside the studio of Gavin Turk. Photo: Laurence Rundell. Courtesy of Ben Brown Fine Arts.

Can you tell us a bit about the theme of the show and the works that will be going on view?

The title of the show, “The Escapologist,” suggests a missing figure, a figurative gap, someone who has either left or is about to appear. That implied absence matters. We are used to seeing portraits of people, the canvas is a portrait canvas, the work isn’t about what lies beyond the door, but about the viewers’ urge to step toward the unknown, even when we can’t be sure what we’re moving into.

This show explores the psychological and symbolic charge of the threshold, the suspended moment between one state and another. The recurring image of the door set ajar becomes a paradox: it is at once an obstruction and an invitation, holding us in a space of anticipation.

As an artist, I have had a lifelong interest in how belief is constructed through images, of course these perspectives and ideas have evolved over time as my world view and indeed our shared world view has shifted.

The door operates as a quiet mechanism for that uncertainty. The image invites us to consider whether escape is truly possible, or whether it is something onto which we project a fiction that allows us to imagine another future.

The show consists of a series of paintings of doors in door frames, and each door is half open with the painting of the door frame carrying on to the edge of the canvas, so they have an illusionistic, sculptural quality. These trompe-l’oeil doors are hung low on the wall, so they appear semi-realistic. Beyond each door a gradient background alludes to different kinds of space—sometimes outside, sometimes inside—a rather ambiguous scene.

Gavin Turk. Photo: Laurence Rundell. Courtesy of Ben Brown Fine Arts.

What were some of the conceptual or inspirational starting points for this body of work specifically?

I have been working for some time with this figure of a door in a suspended door frame, having made a series of larger-than-life and life-size bronze sculpture of painted heritage wooden doors. I am interested in the idea of the door and its frame being detached from its architecture, as an invitation to a start or end point, a simultaneous picture of inside and outside.

I was inspired by a series of paintings from the 1960s by the artists Gerhard Richter, where he depicted very flat, modernist open white doors with gray muted backgrounds. As with many of my works, they consist of layered art historical references or jumping points. This work also incapsulates the Surrealist styles of Magritte, and his use of the door as a kind of surreal metaphor.

An ambiguous psychological terrain, it’s not only a picture of what we see—it seeks to question what we think we see. It suggests that thinking comes prior to seeing, leading me to think of Marcel Duchamp, who suggests that we think conceptually before we see things visually in what he termed “retinal art.” Take for instance his work Door, 11, Rue Larrey (1927), a work I have often returned to, where Duchamp converts a door in his house to work in such a way that one door occupies two door frames, so that the door is always open and closed. For my “Doors” series, I am trying to encapsulate the opening and closing in one frame.

Gavin Turk, Door (with tangerine sky) (2025). Courtesy of Ben Brown Fine Arts.

What role does viewer experience take in your practice? Are there any key takeaways from this next show that you hope visitors have?

For me art is all about the audience, they complete the work. The viewer is all important.

The door is ubiquitous, it’s not a universal object understood in the same form globally, but the threshold or entry point is. The doors I have chosen to focus on could be seen as nostalgic, most are paneled doors, some have a more historic feel, while others are more simplistic in form. I hope the paintings inspire curiosity and are “getable,” for lack of a better word!

Whether in this body of work or in your practice overall, what is the role of art history in your work? Where do you find yourself most often looking to or returning for inspiration, like movements or historical artists?

I think art history is important in my practice, but quite often there’s this suggestion that people feel excluded from the work because they feel they don’t have the art historical prompts, so they feel left out. I would counter this by suggesting that art history is embodied in culture more generally, the language is always in front of us, be it on billboards, social media clips or fashion shows, it’s all replayed on a loop. The connections are ingrained within us and the way that art is formed, the way that art looks or the way that we look at art.

Rather than engaging with my work through a purely art historical lens, I would suggest it’s a playful musing on how to look at ourselves, our own paradigms, and our own ontological sensibilities.

I do find myself returning to moments of the beginning of contemporary art, such as the first self-portraits like Las Meninas (1656) by Diego Velázquez, or works from the Dada movement and the Surrealists—I don’t feel like I am ever very far away from these images.

Gavin Turk, Door (2025). Courtesy of Ben Brown Fine Arts.

Can you give us some insight into your process, where do you start? Do you often find yourself surprised by how a work turns out compared to your initial idea for it?

I have this idea that my art is formed before I create it, so I wouldn’t say I find it through the process of making. I start the work to try to get to something I feel I already know, to solve a problem I am looking at, or thinking of, it could be tied directly to earlier work, or it could be to create a layered solution to a series of problems, be it with my own work, or that of other people’s. Which we could see as the thread throughout my work.

The paintings themselves are a metaphor for painting.

What’s next? Are there any other projects or ideas that you are working on or plan to work on next that you can share with us?

Other projects this year include developing a series of smaller bronze works, of doors and eggs, both of which I see as portals. I will continue with a series of works inspired by the idea of immortalizing household waste, which develops from the period of lockdowns in the U.K., where I collected all my shop-bought waste packaging, creating still life compositions in a Morandi-esque style, then painted. I am looking at the possibility of transformation of our waste through different media to shine a light way of living.

“Gavin Turk: The Escapologist” is on view at Ben Brown Fine Arts, London, March 11–May 22, 2026.