Sadie Coles HQ (Bury St) – Alan Turner: I wanted to make things that were ordinary extraordinary

In September, Sadie Coles HQ presents an exhibition of paintings by the American artist Alan Turner (1943-2020). Turner first achieved recognition in the late 1970s, having spent four years in London between 1968 and 1972; he went on to pursue an idiosyncratic path for half a century, creating work that was consistently “at the edge, if not out of bounds” in relation to figurative art. The exhibition features eight paintings dating from a fertile phase in his career – the years 1986-1990 – during which he focused on the body as a doubly recognisable and reconfigurable entity. In these works, a fascination for fleshly naturalism combines with an affinity for the illogical, the awry and the aberrant.