Luke Turner: Annunciations

Annunciations, Luke Turner's first major solo show, is an exhibition of recent large-scale photographic works, presented over two floors in a space formerly the studio and home of the Systems artist, the late Michael Kidner.

Turner’s practice revolves around the experience of art, the visual realm, and the ghosts of art history. In his Annunciations series, Turner takes Renaissance paintings as a starting point, using photography to attempt to extract, distil and trace the essential element that embodies the autonomous affect of the image, the excess that reveals the unbound plasticity of art. He begins by plotting the line that charts a painting’s chromatic densities, throwing and spinning this around, before crafting a three-dimensional model of the resultant form, which he finally photographs like some kind of strange, auratic, kinetic object. Turner's imagery references the peculiar bilboquets that crop up in the landscapes of Magritte's imaginings, the pawn-shaped bachelors of Duchamp's Large Glass, and the strategic levelleng effect of the blur employed by Gerhard Richter's photorealist paintings. His practice is in equal measure analytical, aleatory and subjective, utilising elements of painting, sculpture, mathematics and photography. This provides an abstruse framework for production that sets out to undermine its own methodology in order to probe the paradoxical characteristics of the autonomous image, and to reveal the alchemical nature of the formless object of art itself.

Luke Turner was born in Manchester in 1982, and lives and works in London. He is a recent graduate of the Royal College of Art.