100-year-old Ken Turner opens Penzance exhibition
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- Ken Turner opens "Ken Turner at 100: A Century of Crashing Culture" at Wharfside Arts Hub in Penzance, running to 4 August, with a performance planned at the opening alongside his daughter
- Last year, Turner drove a 15-tonne tank over a Tesla in a project coordinated by Led By Donkeys, framed by the article as "a damning indictment of corporate greed and rising fascism"
- In the late 1960s, Turner co-founded Action Space, an art collective that built vast walk-in inflatable sculptures for the public decades before immersive art was a mainstream category; the group still operates today as a charity for learning-disabled artists including Turner prize-winner Nnena Kalu
- Fernand Léger taught Turner, who was "mates" with John Berger and made frames for Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, yet rejected a place at the Slade over wall colour and walked away from his Regent Street Polytechnic final exam rather than paint impressionist
- Turner's current paintings, described as "big, grandiose, semi-abstract" and frequently dealing with Gaza's destruction and the climate emergency, are works he says museums — not West End dealers — should buy
- At 100, Turner frames art-making as a medical necessity: "If I didn't [make art], I'd die. It gives me life."
Why it matters: The exhibition crystallises a rare case of a centenarian artist, taught by Fernand Léger and allied with John Berger, still producing work and performing publicly while refusing the commercial gallery circuit he has spurned for 80 years. Turner's stated preference for museum acquisition of his Gaza and climate-themed paintings signals a direct-to-institution path that bypasses the West End dealers he once called "monsters."
