Image: Manifold Editions, London
Manifold Editions has highlighted the making of Gavin Turk’s ‘Revolving Love’ (2022), a limited-edition screenprint that reworks the familiar ‘LOVE’ motif as an optical, rotating form. Produced in blue and orange colourways, the work combines screenprinting with embossing to create a surface in which the letters appear to rotate and pulsate as contrasting colours shift against one another.
Each version of ‘Revolving Love’ is issued in an edition of 60. The 70-by-70-centimetre sheets are signed by Turk on the front and numbered on the reverse. Manifold Editions published both editions in 2022, and its website lists each at £1,500 excluding VAT or sales tax. The publisher’s announcement, issued on August 27, 2026, directs viewers to a studio-process feature and offers the prints for enquiry through its London operation.
The imagery takes Robert Indiana’s ‘LOVE’ design as a starting point, particularly the characteristic instability of its letter ‘O’. In Turk’s version, that small visual disturbance is amplified: the letters are made to appear as if they might spin through 360 degrees. The circular, button-like format is further emphasised by a high-gloss varnish and the embossed surface.
Manifold Editions also identifies connections with Richard Hamilton’s ‘Epiphany’ (1963–1989), whose surface carries the phrase ‘SLIP IT TO ME’, and Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fluttering Hearts’ (1961), citing the works’ use of stuttering or oscillating colour effects. The publisher links the physical form of the prints to Turk’s 1991 Royal College of Art degree-show work ‘Cave’, a glossy ceramic blue heritage plaque.
Turk, born in 1967, is a conceptual artist whose practice addresses questions of artistic content and authorship. He studied at Chelsea School of Art and the Royal College of Art. His 1991 master’s exhibition presented a whitewashed studio with a blue heritage plaque bearing the words ‘Gavin Turk worked here, 1989–1991’; according to Manifold Editions, the presentation led to his being refused a degree.
Turk became prominent in the early 1990s as part of the group commonly known as the Young British Artists, alongside Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas. The publisher states that his work has continued to be exhibited internationally and is held in collections including Tate in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. His public sculptures include ‘L’Âge d’Or’, ‘Nail’ beside St Paul’s Cathedral in London, ‘Axis Mundi’ at Paddington Basin and ‘Ariadne Wrapped’ in Cambridge.
