L’Age d’Or

L’Age d’Or

L'Âge d'Or van Gavin Turk


The Artwork

On World Refugee Day, Sunday 20 June, Mayor Aboutaleb of Rotterdam will unveil a new work of art at the head of the Wilhelminapier. On the Maas, directly opposite the future FENIX Movers Museum L’Age d’Or (2019) by the British visual artist Gavin Turk. L’Age d’Or is a more than 3,5 meter high open door of painted bronze. “This larger-than-life door will soon offer a view of the Maas and then beckon across the North Sea to the Atlantic crossing,” says the Fenix ​​press release. The emigrant museum is donating the artwork on long-term loan to the international sculpture collection of the Municipality of Rotterdam and under management of CBK Rotterdam. The artwork becomes part of the international collection of SIR | Sculpture International Rotterdam.

Manufacturing
2021

The location

The head of the Wilhelminapier is a suitable location, as from the Rotterdam quays more than three million emigrants left for the other side of the world in the 19th and 20th centuries. They left Rotterdam from all over Europe heading for a new life. L’Áge d’Or symbolizes hope, dreams and opportunities at this location as a door that is always open. A door without a building, as a symbolic transition between two imaginary worlds, an old and a new one. Everyone is welcome – after the unveiling on June 20 – to step through the door and fantasize about the future. The new acquisition will be placed in direct company of the sculpture Lost Luggage Depot (2001) by Jeff Wall.

Gavin Turk

Gavin Turk

Gavin Turk (b 1967) is a British born, international artist. He has pioneered many forms of contemporary British sculpture now taken for granted, including the painted bronze, the waxwork, the recycled art-historical icon and the use of rubbish in art.

Turk’s installations and sculptures deal with issues of authorship, authenticity and identity. Concerned with the ‘myth’ of the artist and the ‘authorship’ of a work, Turk’s engagement with this modernist, avant-garde debate stretches back to the ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp.

With Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, among others, Gavin Turk (1967) is counted among the Young British Artists. He elevates the everyday to art and plays with the context of the objects he presents. The sculpture L’Áge d’Or was acquired at the Frieze Sculpture in London in October 2020.

Click here for the website of Gavin Turk

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