Gavin Turk, by Richard Boll
EXPRESSION: Portraits of Artists
Renowned British photographer Richard Boll presents Expression, a recent photography project showcasing a series of portraits of celebrated contemporary artists.
Expression brings to life the individuality and artistry of its subjects through both traditional and contemporary approaches to photographic portraiture.
Yarli Allison, by Richard Boll
The series includes intimate and revealing portraits of well-known artists including Yarli Allison, Rana Begum, Gordon Cheung, Adam Chodzko, Ann Christopher, Marie Harnett, Bruce McLean, Cornelia Parker, and Gavin Turk. Also featured are Sussex-based artists Stig Evans, Richard Graville, James William Murray, and Jake Wood-Evans.
Commenced in 2022, this ongoing project is marked by unique collaborations between Boll and many of his subjects. Notable examples include a painting directly onto Boll’s photographic print by Bruce McLean, the Scottish sculptor, performance artist and painter, the dissection of a photograph with elements of collage by Ann Christopher RA, and performance-based portraits of Gavin Turk and Adam Chodzko. These collaborative elements infuse the portraits with a blend of creative input, resulting in a dynamic and expressive visual narrative.
“Each subject and portrait has had an individual approach and some artists have added collaborative elements to the finished photographic portrait. That creates a moment of anticipation during the reveal, not knowing how the artist has made their mark. But each time I’ve been overwhelmed with their contribution. Collaborating with artists opens the door for works to be created that are beyond my creative potential and is a very exciting process.”
Rana Begum, by Richard Boll
Limited edition prints from the project Expression: Portraits of Artists are available to purchase here.
Adam Chodsko, by Richard Boll
This portrait shows Chodzko wading in a pond in Whitstable, Kent to record the sounds of nature and is a result of extensive discussion between Chodzko and Boll. The image explores the theme of our connection with nature and is exhibited with a recording that was made during the shoot of rustling leaves, flowers, birds, insects, and passing cars.
Adam Chodzko (b. 1965) is a contemporary visual artist exploring the interactions and possibilities of our beliefs and behaviours. His art invents possibilities for collective imagination, wondering how, through our play with the visual, we might perceive more deeply in order to transform our connections with others.
The following editioned prints of this photograph are available in Fuji Crystal lustre archival quality paper. Each print is personally checked for quality, signed, dated, and includes a signed certificate of authenticity.
12x8.5” Prints, edition of 50: £90 (exc. VAT)
24x16.5” Prints, edition of 20: £275 (exc. VAT)
This black and white double portrait was taken at Turk’s London studio. It references such works as Double Red Che (2005) and his self-portrait entitled Portrait of Something That I’ll Never Really See (1997).
Gavin Turk (b.1967) is a British-born, internationally renowned artist, who lives and works in London. He has pioneered many forms of contemporary British sculpture, including the painted bronze, the waxwork, the recycled art-historical icons, 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 ontological questioning.
Turk was included in several YBA exhibitions and his work is held within public and private collections worldwide, including the TATE, Museum of Modern Art New York, Museum MMK Für Moderne Kunst, Musée Magritte Museum, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The following editioned prints of this photograph are available in Hahnemuhle Fine Art Pearl archival quality paper. Each print is personally checked for quality, signed, dated, and includes a signed certificate of authenticity.
12x9” Prints, edition of 50: £90 (exc. VAT)
24x16” Prints, edition of 20: £275 (exc. VAT)
This photograph draws on such portraits as Not to be Reproduced(La Reproduction Interdit, 1937), by the Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte, a significant influence on the work of Gavin Turk. At the time of the shoot Turk was working on his series Kerze, meticulously rendered still-lifes of recently extinguished candles based on Gerhard Richter’s renowned photorealist paintings.
Gavin Turk (b.1967) is a British-born, internationally renowned artist, who lives and works in London. He has pioneered many forms of contemporary British sculpture, including the painted bronze, the waxwork, the recycled art-historical icons, 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 ontological questioning.
Turk was included in several YBA exhibitions and his work is held within public and private collections worldwide, including the TATE, Museum of Modern Art New York, Museum MMK Für Moderne Kunst, Musée Magritte Museum, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The following editioned prints of this photograph are available in Fuji Crystal lustre archival quality paper. Each print is personally checked for quality, signed, dated, and includes a signed certificate of authenticity.
9x12” Prints, edition of 50: £90 (exc. VAT)
17.5x24” Prints, edition of 20: £275 (exc. VAT)
This portrait was taken in Gordon Cheung’s London studio. During post-production, Cheung has applied his signature digital glitch - an algorithmic blur that distorts the pixels - inviting the viewer to question time, space, and reality in this collaborative portrait.
Born in 1975 in London to Chinese parents, Gordon Cheung has developed an innovative approach to making art, which blurs virtual and actual reality to reflect on the existential questions of what it means to be human in civilisations with histories written by victors. Cheung raises questions and critiques the effects of global capitalism, and its underlying mechanisms of power on our perception of identity, territory, and sense of belonging. These narratives are refracted through the prisms of culture, mythology, religion, and politics into dreamlike spaces of urban surreal worlds that are rooted in his in-between identity.
The following editioned prints of this photograph are available in Fuji Crystal lustre archival quality paper. Each print is personally checked for quality, signed, dated, and includes a signed certificate of authenticity.
12x10” Prints, edition of 50: £90 (exc. VAT)
24x19” Prints, edition of 20: £275 (exc. VAT)
This portrait was taken at Allison’s studio in London. She is photographed wearing one of her wearable pieces which references her sculptural and performative works. Boll and Allison together created the mise-en-scène featuring a series of props, clothing, and headgear.
Yarli Allison (she/they) (b.1988) - a Canadian-born, Hong Kongese art-worker based between the UK and Paris with an interdisciplinary approach that traverses sculpture, installation, CGI (VR/AR/3D modeling/game), moving images, drawings, poetry, tattooing, and performances.
The following editioned prints of this photograph are available in Fuji Crystal lustre archival quality paper. Each print is personally checked for quality, signed, dated, and includes a signed certificate of authenticity.
9x12” Prints, edition of 50: £90 (exc. VAT)
19x24” Prints, edition of 20: £275 (exc. VAT)
This portrait of Rana Begum was taken at her London studio. Keen to celebrate the strong use of colour and light in Begum’s work, Boll held coloured filters in front of the lens while using natural light to capture this portrait.
The work of London-based artist Rana Begum distills spatial and visual experience into ordered form. Through her refined language of Minimalist abstraction, Begum blurs the boundaries between sculpture, painting, and architecture. Her visual language draws from the urban landscape as well as geometric patterns from traditional Islamic art and architecture. Light is fundamental to her process. Begum’s works absorb and reflect varied densities of light to produce an experience for the viewer that is both temporal and sensorial.
Born in Bangladesh in 1977, Rana Begum lives and works in London.
The following editioned prints of this photograph are available in Fuji Crystal lustre archival quality paper. Each print is personally checked for quality, signed, dated, and includes a signed certificate of authenticity.
9x12” Prints, edition of 50: £90 (exc. VAT)
18x24” Prints, edition of 20: £275 (exc. VAT)
This portrait was shot on black and white film using a Hasselblad medium format camera. The background of antique pigment bottles was constructed by Evans in his Brighton studio. Boll produced the silver gelatine fibre print in a darkroom which was then hand-coloured by Evans, who also applied 21,915 “strikes” in pencil. Each strike representing a day of his life.
Stig Evans (b.1964) is a painter and public artist. He is based in Brighton, UK. Evans' work investigates concepts of visibility and perception. He uses colour to explore our visual acuity, how we perceive it, respond to it, represent it, and by its historical, chemical and physical and immaterial nature. He paints with an airbrush, building up many layers of sprayed colour creating chromatic colour experiences where boundaries, borders and chroma subtly move and shift in front of the eye.
The following editioned prints of this photograph are available in Hahnemuhle Fine Art Pearl archival quality paper. Each print is personally checked for quality, signed, dated, and includes a signed certificate of authenticity.
10x12” Prints, edition of 50: £90 (exc. VAT)
19.5x24” Prints, edition of 20: £275 (exc. VAT)
This portrait of Cornelia Parker was shot on black and white film using a Hasselblad medium format camera in the garden of the artist’s London home. Using a garden shed as a backdrop, Boll used available natural light to capture the portrait and hand-printed the silver gelatine fibre print in a darkroom in Lewes.
Cornelia Parker (b. 1956) is well known for her large scale, often site specific, installations. Her engagement with the fragility of existence and the transformation of matter is exemplified in two key works: Dark Matter, a cartoon-like reconstruction of an exploded army shed, and Heart of Darkness, the formal arrangement of charred remains from a forest fire. There is an apocalyptic tone to much of her work but she also demonstrates a concern with the more insidious effects of global warming and consumerism.
The following editioned prints of this photograph are available in Hahnemuhle Fine Art Pearl archival quality paper. Each print is personally checked for quality, signed, dated, and includes a signed certificate of authenticity.
10x10” Prints, edition of 50: £90 (exc. VAT)
20x20” Prints, edition of 20: £275 (exc. VAT)
This portrait was shot on black and white film using an Ebony 5x4” large format camera in Jake Wood-Evans’ studio in Sussex. Boll hand-printed a series of silver gelatine fibre prints which were then left on the floor of Wood-Evans’ studio for several months. They collected paint marks, drips, and textures from the artist at work. This collaborative portrait explore aspects of time as it develops its own history of marks.
In an age dominated by screens and pixelated image, Jake Wood-Evans’ work feels like a welcome antidote. Drawing on the legacies of Old Masters, his intention is to capture the essence of these historic works without replicating them, depicting familiar, yet obscured subject matter.
Creating ethereal images that are both unsettling and beautiful, Wood-Evans’ powerful use of light emerges from a loose and instinctive application of paint. His oil paintings shimmer with luminous and intense layers of colour as bold marks, dripping oils and scored surfaces sit in company with fine, delicate detail. The artist, born in 1980, lives and works near Lewes, East Sussex.
The following editioned prints of this photograph are available in Hahnemuhle Fine Art Pearl archival quality paper. Each print is personally checked for quality, signed, dated, and includes a signed certificate of authenticity.
10x12” Prints, edition of 50: £90 (exc. VAT)
19.5x24” Prints, edition of 20: £275 (exc. VAT)
This collaborative piece started with a photographic portrait taken by Boll at Graville’s Brighton studio. Overlayed with a 95% white layer in post-production, Boll created a subtle photographic print featuring a faint image upon which Graville then applied paint. The final portrait echoes the subtle aesthetics of Graville’s own paintings.
Richard Graville is a British artist. His paintings, executed using a mixture of matt and high gloss paints, depict abstract forms infused with emphatic, sign-like qualities. He has developed his oeuvre by analysing the secret codes of animal colouration. The paintings combine strategies animals use to warn and deceive their adversaries while simultaneously seducing a mate. He isolates these codes to meditate on how our feelings of the sublime arise from our biological roots.
The following editioned prints of this photograph are available in Fuji Crystal lustre archival quality paper. Each print is personally checked for quality, signed, dated, and includes a signed certificate of authenticity.
10x10” Prints, edition of 50: £90 (exc. VAT)
20x20” Prints, edition of 20: £275 (exc. VAT)
This collaborative portrait initiated the idea for the Expression project.
Boll visited McLean’s London studio for a portrait shoot and was keen to reference the artists work by incorporating the teacup (bought from a charity shop for the shoot), referencing Tea on the Knee (1971). The blank canvases seen in the background inspired the idea to add collaborative elements and Boll invited McLean to apply paint onto the print. McLean added a painting of a sculpture of a jug to the final photographic print. The portrait was shot on a Hasselblad medium format camera using natural daylight.
Bruce McLean is an acclaimed Scottish sculptor, filmmaker, and painter. He studied at the Glasgow School of Art and at Saint Martin's School of Art, where he and others rebelled against what appeared to be the formalist academicism of his teachers. In 1965, he abandoned conventional studio production in favour of impermanent sculptures using materials such as water, along with performances of a generally satirical nature directed against the art world. From the mid-1970s, McLean turned increasingly to painting, sculpture, and film work and won the John Moores Painting Prize in 1985. He has a large studio in the west of London.
The following editioned prints of this photograph are available in Hahnemuhle Fine Art Pearl archival quality paper. Each print is personally checked for quality, signed, dated, and includes a signed certificate of authenticity.
10x10” Prints, edition of 50: £90 (exc. VAT)
20x20” Prints, edition of 20: £275 (exc. VAT)
This portrait was shot at Christopher’s workshop using a digital medium format camera and natural daylight. Christopher then deconstructed the physical photographic print by cutting lines into the portrait and adding elements of collage.
A non-figurative sculptor working primarily in cast bronze, stainless steel, silver, and fabricated corten; her work comprises both large and small sculptures, site-specific commissions, drawings, prints - etchings, and photo assemblages. She was elected to the Royal Academy in 1980 and currently lives and works north of Bath, UK.
The following editioned prints of this photograph are available in Hahnemuhle Fine Art Pearl archival quality paper. Each print is personally checked for quality, signed, dated, and includes a signed certificate of authenticity.
12x9.5” Prints, edition of 50: £90 (exc. VAT)
24x18.5” Prints, edition of 20: £275 (exc. VAT)
This portrait of Harnett was taken in a London cafe. The artist was photographed whilst drawing and was taken using available natural light with a digital medium format camera. Boll’s approach was to produce an image that referenced the film-like, atmospheric qualities of Harnett’s artworks with a more natural, spontaneous and informal portrait.
Marie Harnett (b. 1983, Hertfordshire, UK) received her B.A (Hons) from Edinburgh College of Art in 2006. She is best known for her highly detailed and intricate drawings of film stills. Her work explores the themes of human interaction and intense emotion. She examines the potential of images to create an emotional response. She lives and works in London.
The following editioned prints of this photograph are available in Hahnemuhle Fine Art Pearl archival quality paper. Each print is personally checked for quality, signed, dated, and includes a signed certificate of authenticity.
12x8” Prints, edition of 50: £90 (exc. VAT)
24x16” Prints, edition of 20: £275 (exc. VAT)
This performance-style portrait captures Gavin Turk in his London studio writing his signature in the air. It pays homage to Turk’s earlier works including Multiple Signature (1999) and Jazzz Signature (2009), while referencing Gjon Mili’s photographs of Picasso drawing with light, taken in 1949. The use of red and blue references Turk’s pieces I (2015) and That (2015).
Gavin Turk (b.1967) is a British-born, internationally renowned artist, who lives and works in London. He has pioneered many forms of contemporary British sculpture, including the painted bronze, the waxwork, the recycled art-historical icons, 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 ontological questioning.
Turk was included in several YBA exhibitions and his work is held within public and private collections worldwide, including the TATE, Museum of Modern Art New York, Museum MMK Für Moderne Kunst, Musée Magritte Museum, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The following editioned prints of this photograph are available in Fuji Crystal lustre archival quality paper. Each print is personally checked for quality, signed, dated, and includes a signed certificate of authenticity.
12x9” Prints, edition of 50: £90 (exc. VAT)
24x17.5” Prints, edition of 20: £275 (exc. VAT)