This Summer, we invited some of our favourite artistic, musical and photographic visionaries to guest edit Dazed Digital, kicking off with Antony and The Johnsons' Antony Hegarty last week. This week's guest editor, outsider artist Gavin Turk speaks to us about his current artistic obsession, the evil eye, and how it affected his work in 2010-2011:
"As an artist, with the surname Turk, who often makes reference to the cultural intimacies present in art, for a show in Istanbul last year I said I wanted to make some large painted canvases which could be both target pop paintings and pictures of eyes or more specifically evil eyes. A beautiful ultramarine ring around white around, pale blue, around black. This symbol is used to deflect jealousy or envy away from the owner. The evil eye is almost a second flag in Turkey as it can be seen everywhere and is the best selling tourist souvenir. When I set out to make this work, it seemed that it would be a doddle, just pour a few layers of paint on the canvas and there you go! But over a year later I'm still trying to perfect it, there has been gallons of paint unsuccessfully poured all over the place but last week it seems (there's always a chance that when you stop watching the paint dry it does something weird) the eye has landed."
'TÜRK' featuring the Evil Eyes opens on 18th September at Galerist in Istanbul.
Read more via the first instalment of our Gavin Turk Take Over HERE. Read more from our Summer Takeover HERE.
