More than just a brand name, 'Gavin Turk' has become this YBA artist's conceptual persona and calling card. For this exhibition, 'Gavin & Turk' pays homage to the late Italian conceptualist Alighiero e Boetti (for whom there will be a Tate Modern retrospective later in the month), albeit one that seeks to expose the complex nature and (mis)use of artistic influence. Judging by Turk's corporate-cum-art-historical restyling of his new business moniker here – reconfigured over and again in paint, thread and biro – even he appears bored with brainstorming its art-edition potential. This colourful, purposely conservative display of paintings and tapestries does bring to mind the questions one typically associates with his work, about the role of the artist and the conceits and contradictions of the art-world armature that supports them – these are, after all, works for sale. One is left asking who really benefits from the reminder, but is this enough?
Each arrangement of the letters in his name highlights the drip-effect of art history through the everyday and the shifting production values that result. Canvas grids of 'RUT', 'VAG', 'GAV' and Arabic script (one can guess how this translates), hand-stitched by inmates on a charity needlework programme, evoke Boetti and Robert Indiana as much as airline furnishings and high-street copy shops. Gold-leaf lettering proves not quite luxe enough to make the associative leap from wrapping paper to religious painting, while two monochrome canvases offer a very thin Robert Ryman experience. Thankfully, a beautifully manufactured 1:1 bronze self-portrait in a neighbouring room (of the artist in a suit brandishing a hose that spurts water at intervals on to his heated head) provides serious distraction from the word-searchable editions. There is something genuinely quite sad and rather touching about Turk's staging of his deeply mortal, mid-life self for consumption – a more meaningful acknowledgement of the distance between the iconic and the everyday even than the 2000 waxwork of himself as Warhol's painting of Sid Vicious.