power › Nick Turvey

Last Laugh – box set

2020. Mixed media. 30 x 10 10 cm.

A grace note to mark the end of this project. Gruesomely detailed. If you don’t know La Specola museum in Florence, then you have a treat in store.
Last Laugh – Venice

2019. Pop-up performance at the Venice Biennale.

My favourite response to the performance was the violent anger that it provoked in some people. And they were right, of course. We are being taken for fools. But when we start laughing at the powerful, they can prove remarkably fragile. Ceausescu’s fall was an education.

Flyers were distributed during the performance, with links to free downloadable 3D models of the heads, and a competition inviting people to make their own creative use of them.
Last Laugh – Venice

2019. Pop-up performance at the Venice Biennale.

The locally recruited actors responded to wearing these giant heads and the non-stop manic laughter tracks with a fantastically inventive range of gestures and body language. The rictus expressions of the masks seemed to come alive.
Last Laugh – Robert

2018. Fibreglass and acrylic paint, with integrated video guidance system, battery powered PA and looped laughter track. 65 x 36 x 36 cm.
Last Laugh – Robert

2018. Fibreglass and acrylic paint, with integrated video guidance system, battery powered PA and looped laughter track. 65 x 36 x 36 cm.

Since my time in Pietrasanta, I have been fascinated by representing hair in sculpture. It’s about finding the appropriate system of abstraction, and the hand learning the gestures.
Last Laugh – Kim

2018. Fibreglass and acrylic paint, with integrated video guidance system, battery powered PA and looped laughter track. 65 x 36 x 36 cm.
Last Laugh – Kim

2018. Fibreglass and acrylic paint, with integrated video guidance system, battery powered PA and looped laughter track. 65 x 36 x 36 cm.
Last Laugh – Bashar – pocket version

2017. Polyurethane resin. 5 x 3 x 3 cm. Unlimited edition.

A little bit of Voodoo. There is something very pleasing about carrying around the shrunken, severed head of your enemy. It worked on Robert, and eventually Bashar. We live in hope. If you ask me nicely, I might give you one of these.
Last Laugh – Bashar

2016. Fibreglass and acrylic paint, with integrated video guidance system, battery powered PA and looped laughter track. 65 x 36 x 36cm.

We have all known bullies. They like to excuse it as having a laugh. But at what point will we draw the line, and say this is enough, it’s not funny anymore? At what point does tyranny itself become ridiculous?

Coinciding with a period that saw me erase myself from the internet, this was the first in a series of wearables, designed for performance, that turned into a 3 year dark project, in which I engaged with portraiture for the first time.
Animal Spirits
2017. Wood, money, buttons, cotton. 41 x 15 x 6 cm.

I inherited this from my economist father, a souvenir from his consulting work in Africa. I re-carved it to have the eyes from one of Rembrandt’s later self portraits, sadder and wiser after its engagement with global capital.
Mummy And Daddy
2014. Vitrine, wallpaper, model V2 rocket, model atom bomb and mixed media. 79 x 41 x 129 cm.

The Cowboys and Indians wallpaper that lines the floor of this vitrine was in my bedroom as a child. In retrospect it seems hardly accidental, living as we were in the shadow of Mutual Assured Destruction, another mythic confrontation.
Leviathan
2014. Mixed media. 104 x 134 x 13 cm.

Is this an autopsy or a life-saving operation? In/Out? Independence? Just like our parents, the nation state is more vulnerable than we like to think. Shout out to Thomas Hobbes.
Dieu et Mon Droit
2014. Bronze resin and mixed media, plywood, paint and flag. 66 x 100 x 84 cm.

Edwin Landseer’s allegorical animal portraits are a great source of inspiration, as are Bernini’s illusionist textures. This snarling armoured car is a piece of contemporary heraldry, reflecting the sense of entitlement that power creates.
It’s A Boy (detail)
2014. Vitrine, wallpaper, carved marble. 79 x 41 x 129 cm.
Innocent (detail)
2014. Vitrine, wallpaper and mixed media. 79 x 41 x 129 cm.

In a dream I was making an artwork involving a battle tank and a pile of rubble. The solution was revealed to me by a man with a dead rabbit (Joseph Beuys, obviously), resulting in a series of vitrines. The title of this one alludes to Francis Bacon’s version of the painting by Velasquez, another portrait of power.
Dear Leader – Shanghai
2014. Solid cast bronze, gold plated and enamel paint. Unique. 28 x 14 x 5 cm.

In granting the State a monopoly on violence, we become dependent on it. This totem of benign/malign authority melds Artemis of Ephesus with that latter-day avenging angel, the Tomahawk missile. Shanghai is one in an ongoing series of regional interpretations of the idea.
Dear Leader – Original Version
2014. Solid cast bronze and acrylic paint. Edition of 5. 28 x 14 x 5 cm.

In granting the State a monopoly on violence, we become dependent on it. This totem of benign/malign authority melds Artemis of Ephesus with that latter-day avenging angel, the Tomahawk missile.