Luke Turner examines what happens when art history and science collide, but with almost masochistic relish. His large-scale photographs are the end product of a process that puts the essentialism of Old Master paintings through a veritable endurance test. Taking a painting such as Cosimo Tura’s “Virgin and Child Enthroned”, Luke takes the line that charts the picture’s chromatic densities, whips it around like a spinning top, and then creates a three-dimensional model of the resultant form, which he photographs like some kind of strange, auratic, kinetic object. Deeply technical but also highly subjective, his practice turns abstraction into encryption to explore just how pure, how essential, and how unique an artwork really is. Luke Turner graduated with an MA from the RCA in 2010; notable exhibitions include “Systems and Patterns” at the Whitechapel Gallery (2009), “Let’s Go Home”, Hamburg, Germany (2009), Purdy Hicks Gallery (2010), and he was selected as “One to Watch” by Jotta Magazine (2009).
