Gavin Turk (born 1967) is a British artist from Guildford in Surrey, and was considered to be one of the Young British Artists. Turk's oeuvre deals with issues of authenticity and identity, engaged with modernist and avant-garde debates surrounding the 'myth' of the artist and the 'authorship' of a work of art.

Turk studied at Chelsea School of Art from 1986 to 1989, and at the Royal College of Art from 1989 to 1991.

In 1991, tutors at the Royal College of Art refused to present Gavin Turk with his postgraduate degree, a decision based on his graduation exhibition, which was titled Cave, and consisted of a whitewashed studio space, containing a blue heritage plaque of the kind normally found on historic buildings, commemorating his own presence as a sculptor, stating "Gavin Turk worked here, 1989–1991". This bestowed some instant notoriety on Turk, whose work was collected by numerous collectors including Charles Saatchi, who later exhibited Turk's work in the exhibition Sensation, which toured London (Royal Academy of Arts), Berlin (Hamburger Bahnhof) and New York (Brooklyn Museum). Turk attended the private view of the Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy, dressed as a down-and-out. The blue plaque from the Cave installation was later exhibited in a museum style case as Relic (Cave), he also had a version of it made by one of the companies who make blue plaques for English Heritage and this is in the Tate collection.

He has subsequently produced an extensive body of work, which purports to question the value and integrity of a hermetic artistic identity. Turk was considered to be one of the group of artists known as the Young British Artists.

Turk's wide ranging practice often incorporates iconic images of figures taken from popular culture and art historical sources. A series of detailed life-sized waxworks, incorporating the artist's own appearance, features the artist assuming various poses as different characters, including Sid Vicious, Jean-Paul Marat, and the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara. Turk's most famous work in this series, Pop (1993), is a waxwork of Turk as Sid Vicious. The work appropriates the stance of Andy Warhol's screen print of Elvis Presley. In the work, the right hand is pointing a gun, a motif which recurs in other works in the series, such as Bum (1998).

Turk has appropriated recognisable elements from artists such as Jacques-Louis David, Yves Klein, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, René Magritte, Alighiero Boetti, Robert Morris (artist), Jasper Johns and The Death of Marat painting by Jacques-Louis David.

From 2005 Turk began producing a small number of silkscreen works on canvas, depicting himself as Elvis Presley, in a pose taken from the paintings by Andy Warhol of the same subject from the 1960s, such as Warhol's Triple Elvis. Turk applied diamond dust to some of the Elvis works made from diamanté applied to silkscreened canvas in vibrant pop colours, which sparkles in direct light. Examples of Turk's Elvis series are Diamond Yellow Elvis, 2005 and Diamond Pink Elvis, 2005. A set of what appeared to be classic posters of Che Guevara in a beret, again revealed themselves on further scrutiny to be photos of Turk himself.

A series of three-dimensional trompe-l'œil works includes objects cast into bronze, painted to give the appearance of the original object. Possibly his most revered works, these include bronze sculptures of plastic rubbish bags, see "Bag" (2000). Other sculptures include Nomad (2002), a bronze cast of a sleeping bag, and Box (2002), which resembles a cardboard box. Turk is perhaps the leading exponent of the painted bronze, and has cast objects from spent matches to worn paving slabs to discarded vehicle exhaust pipes.