Ken Turner solo show Penzance 2026

 Ken Turner is 100 years old, still painting, and celebrating his birthday with a solo show at Penzance’s Wharfside Gallery, 10-7 Tuesday to Sunday, 23 July to 4 August 2026.

If you google there are very few artists alive and working at this age and that in itself made me approach the show with awe akin to seeing Keith Richard perform, and he and Mick Jagger are a mere 82 years old.

It’s a large room full of big square paintings in a vigorous expressionist style that convey emotion - anguish, rage or excitement.

‘My Ride Over a Tesla Car’, 2025, is one of the most memorable as it’s linked to Ken Turner’s performance, actually driving in a Sherman tank over a Tesla car with FASCISM as its number plate,  as a protest against Musk and all he stands for. What a wild and genius idea.

You can watch this and many of Ken Turner’s  previous performances on video there and headphones are provided. 

There are also available to buy two books Ken has written.
The breadth, inventiveness, humour, outrage and variety are inspirational. Also the sheer sangfroid to keep going, keep caring about the state of the world, and the craziness of the art world, despite the seeming indifference of people who are  passive as Ken tries again and again to provoke them.

 

‘Grief of the World’ is a quietly grim picture of endurance with a face rather like Ken’s own.

 

‘Nature is Crying Out’ is a wonderfully complex composition carried out with such panache and vivid sense of design that it holds your attention.

Well here’s a happy birthday to Ken Turner.

An exhibition I leave feeling encouraged to continue.



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Ken Turner's talk July 16 2023 at Porthmeor studios.

 Ken Turner as an artist is an old campaigner, now aged 95 he gave a remarkable hour long talk, standing up throughout and making it memorable by smashing a rather nice bone china cup with a hammer to show how things have a life and change, and then making an action painting, narrowly missing splattering the audience of interested cognoscenti with paint.

Ken  shook the bottle of paint up and down and squirted it out - rather an invitation to Freudian interpretation. One bottle was a bit stuck at first. However, then he made the splurges into something else with a few flourishes of a brush.

This took place in the Borlase Smart room at Porthmeor studios where Ken has a show of large abstractions until the end of July. These vigorous expressions have titles to which it is sometimes
hard to see the connections in the images.

However Ken Turner’s talk was about art and life rather than his exhibition or his lavishly illustrated available book, ‘A Life Being Ken Turner’.
He referred to Heidegger and other philosophers, to the chaotic state of the world, the art world’s deplorable market, and the need for aesthetic education to sensitise people to the forms and experiences they meet and make.

Dyhano asked if another person’s work would do just as well without the Heidegger connection?

Ken invited us to dwell on the importance of the life of things, to value feelings, to see that art can embody all that the artist has become.

The force of his conviction held us involved as participants in the event and its theatricality left an impression that I turned over in my mind as I walked home.