Daniel Turner, Sculptor of Minimalist Objects with an Edge, Heads to Hauser & Wirth

Hauser & Wirth, the mega-gallery with more than a dozen locations across three continents, has added to its roster the sculptor Daniel Turner, whose work invokes and subverts the visual language of Minimalism. The gallery will host its first show by him in 2024.

Turner is the third artist added the gallery’s growing stable in the past month, after the sculptor Barbara Chase-Riboud and the painter Flora Yukhnovich, whose Rococo-influenced canvases have been a hit at auction.

By contrast to these artists, Turner’s work hews more conceptual. For his 2022 show at the Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland, he brought items such as radiators and oil tanks from sites that formerly functioned as mental health facilities and labs, and re-presented them. Rather than showing them in their initial form, Turner melted them down until they resembled bars of steel, which he then stacked and clustered.

And in 2017, Turner memorably melted down parts of the kitchen of Eleven Madison Park, the famed New York restaurant, which then exhibited the equipment upon its reopening in a renovated form that year.

In undertaking projects like that one, the New York–based artist intends to show how objects carry with them certain meanings, even when they are seen apart from the original contexts.

Solo shows by Turner have appeared at Karma in Amagansett, König Galerie in Berlin, White Cube in London, the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, and Team Gallery in New York. In 2024, he will have an exhibition at the Musée des Arts Contemporains Grand Hornu in Belgium.

He is married to the painter Rita Ackermann, another Hauser & Wirth–represented artist, and appeared in a group show curated by her for the gallery in 2014. In 2018, Turner had a residency at Hauser & Wirth’s Somerset gallery.

Hauser & Wirth said it will continue to represent Turner in collaboration with Galerie Allen in Paris.

Gallery present Marc Payot said in a statement, “Given our longstanding dedication to the medium of sculpture, we are especially delighted to welcome Daniel Turner to the gallery. His work, which is rooted in deep material study, unleashes the potential of seemingly familiar everyday objects by refashioning them into something entirely new and uncanny. His art is both conceptually rigorous and profoundly soulful.”