In pictures: Gavin Turk's neon art

Artist Gavin Turk has opened the first exhibition of his neon artworks, created over the last 20 years. Turk rose to prominence in the early 1990s when his work went on show at the infamous Sensations exhibition that also launched the careers of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. His new exhibition is at the Bowes Museum in County Durham.

The gallery used the Kickstarter crowdfunding website to raise £8.600 to install a new work on the front of the building. The number is supposed to be the population of the planet at the time of the exhibition's opening. Turk obtained the figure by taking an average of more than a dozen population estimates. "It’s very specific but still a wild estimation," he said. "It becomes a kind of moment in time. It’s the sign of the times, if you like. Which is what good art should be."

Another figure inside the gallery is a higher number, supposedly showing how much the world's population would have grown in the time it took for a visitor to enter the building.

It is one of the first examples of a British gallery using sites like Kickstarter to raise funds for an exhibition. Some 145 people donated between £1 and £1,000 each. "It’s one way that museums in the future might have to take seriously in terms of how they fund projects," Turk said.

Turk is known for his provocative bronze sculptures of bin bags and waxworks of himself posing as Sid Vicious and Che Guevara. This exhibition includes 15 neon works. "Its daily use in advertising doorways – it’s a material of advertising and provocation," the artist said. "It says, 'I’m open, come here.' It’s about consumption."

Turk's first neon work was Still Life with Lobster, which is a reference to the depiction of lobsters in 16th Century still life paintings and Salvador Dali's surreal lobster telephone. The exhibition runs at the Bowes Museum until 21 April before going on tour to the New Art Centre in Salisbury and the Grundy Art Gallery in Blackpool.