Ken Turner at 100: the St Ives artist who tanked a Tesla
Most people reach a hundred and get a card from the King. Ken Turner is reaching his with a crushed electric car, a tank and a film shot on out-of-date stock.
The St Ives artist Ken Turner, born in 1926 and billed as the UK’s oldest performance artist and painter, turns 100 this summer. To mark it, a major exhibition lands in Penzance tracing what a century of deliberate trouble looks like on canvas, on film and in the flesh.
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A century of crashing culture
Ken Turner at 100: A Century of Crashing Culture runs from 23 July to 4 August 2026 at Wharfside Arts Hub, inside the Wharfside Shopping Centre on Wharf Road, Penzance. Entry is free. Doors are open Tuesday to Sunday, 11am to 7pm.
The show brings together painting, performance art and film, and it moves across a huge span of Ken’s career. It reaches back through modernism, environmental art, performance art and postmodernism, and forward to his most recent work on global conflict and environmental collapse.
The centrepiece of the story is the moment that put him in headlines around the world. In 2025, then aged 98, Ken drove a 15-tonne tank over a Tesla and flattened it. The stunt was staged with Led By Donkeys, the political campaign group, and he framed it as a statement against the rise of fascism, made with equal parts steel and humour. For Ken it was one more entry in a life spent, in his words, “crashing culture.”
What’s on show
The exhibition includes his newest paintings. Among them is My Ride Over a Tesla Car, made in response to the crushing itself, alongside Beyond the Grave, a five foot by five foot piece in gypsum and acrylic on canvas from 2026.
His current Weeping World series works the same materials into a thick, physical surface meant to hold the texture of more than eight decades of making art. As Ken puts it, “My work attempts to create potent and positive images that bypass the notion of being purely political… I am deeply concerned about the ‘touchiness’ in paint, revealing hidden but positive meanings through innovative aesthetics and techniques.”
There is film too. A performance art video archive and footage from his Action Space years sit alongside Huw Wahl’s 16mm film My Ride Over a Tesla (2026), which documents the tank event and the painting that followed, playing on loop through the run.
A film premiere at Newlyn
The centenary also brings a world premiere. Expiry (2026) screens for the first time at Newlyn Filmhouse on Sunday 26 July at 2pm, a ticketed event followed by a Q&A with both Ken and the film’s director.
Shot entirely on expired 16mm film stock, Expiry is a collaboration between Ken and his son, the filmmaker Huw Wahl. It is not billed as a retrospective. The pair describe it as a “love letter to aging playfully,” and it asks what creative action looks like at the edge of a century.
Huw Wahl’s films have screened at festivals from Copenhagen to Montreal and in galleries including Centre Pompidou-Metz and the Whitworth in Manchester. His work has been funded by Arts Council England, The Henry Moore Foundation and the Royal Photographic Society, and featured in The Guardian, Sight and Sound and The Wire.
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Open Studio in St Ives
While Penzance holds the newest work, the historical context sits an easy trip away in St Ives. Ken’s working studio at Anjou Barn, Trevalgan, TR26 3BJ, opens on a free drop-in basis from 23 July to 4 August, Tuesday to Sunday, 11am to 4pm.
The Open Studio spans his entire collection, from early sketches to current work, so visitors can walk the full arc rather than just the latest chapter.
Eight decades of rebellion
Ken’s route to this point runs through most of the postwar British art scene. Conscripted as a “Bevin Boy” down the coal mines during the Second World War, he went on to build a lifelong link between art, education and social action. He set up an Environmental Design course at Barnet College in 1961, taught experimentally at the Architectural Association, and taught foundation at Central Saint Martins in London from 1960 to 1990.
Early exhibitions took in the ICA in 1963 and Lord’s Gallery in 1966. He worked with playwright Arnold Wesker on Resolution 42, a movement around trade union legislation for the arts, and helped found The First Group in 1967 to tour modern art to twelve municipal galleries across the UK.
Then came the work he is best known for. In 1968 Ken co-founded Action Space with the artist Mary Turner, a charitable trust that pushed interdisciplinary performance and giant inflatable structures across the UK and Europe for ten years. It began with a piece called Paradise Gardens, part of the ‘Bubble City’ festival that theatre director Joan Littlewood set up in London in 1968 to explore better ways of building cities.
He moved to St Ives in the 1990s and has lived and worked there ever since, mixing live performance, 3D work and abstract painting. His recent Cornish solo shows include Climate Change at Fish Factory in Penryn in 2021 and a show at the Borlase Smart Gallery, Porthmeor Studios, St Ives in 2024. His books Crashing Culture (2016) and A Life Being Ken Turner (2020) cover the wider career, his work sits in the Arts Council Collection, and he still posts new pieces on his Instagram.
How to see it
The exhibition and the Open Studio both run 23 July to 4 August 2026, both free. Wharfside Arts Hub in Penzance opens 11am to 7pm, the St Ives studio 11am to 4pm, Tuesday to Sunday in each case. Expiry premieres at Newlyn Filmhouse on Sunday 26 July at 2pm.
For eight decades Ken’s work has kept circling the same question: how can art embody radicality? At 100, with a tank behind him and a premiere ahead, he is still not treating it as rhetorical.
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