'artists pick artists'

'artists pick artists'

This is an exhibition where gallery artists each choose one other artist whose work they follow, like or find related to their own. The exhibited artists this time includes; Erdal Duman, Serkan Demir, Onur Gülfidan, Berkay Tuncay, Gözde İlkin, Yasemin Özcan, Gökçe Er, Komet, Merve Üstünalp, Duygu Sabancılar.


Gökçe Er hosts quite a well-known artist, Komet. The main reason behind her choice is the connection between her new works and Komet’s work, “O Zaman Çıkıp Gittim” (“That’s When I Left”) dated 2007. Gökçe Er finds the sentiment and form in her three paintings with themes of birth, breath, and death, match that in Komet’s work, and hence presents them together. A contrast in terms of size is also to be observed.

Berkay Tuncay is the guest of Onur Gülfidan, who incites us to form our own personal stories by juxtaposing on canvas, seemingly unrelated images. Berkay’s works present us with images we recognize from the world of the Internet and yet whose role in our lives we fail to consciously perceive. The photo print in the exhibition titled “Untitled (Still Nature)”, leads us to question, in Berkay’s characteristic way, both fiction and fact.

Gözde İlkin evokes a new world order through the image of the Statue of Liberty in her work using stitching on a found tapestry. Her chosen artist Yasemin Özcan features in the exhibition with her installation titled “official and civilian” inspired by an ordinary shop front of a tailor in Sinop district that says, “We sew all kinds of official and civilian clothing.” With A4 sheet sized picture frames referencing uniform corporate inventory lists and the dictionary entries for “official” and “civilian”, Gözde invites the viewer to ponder the very concepts.

Erdal Duman, who critiques various ideologies through his self-made metal weaponry, greets us this time with a shield of his own design. The object contains an ironic transformation. A similar irony can be seen in the work of Erdal’s guest, Serkan Demir. The ewer formed out of a jerry can provokes contemplation about the split between mentalities of the East and West as well as the perception of this material’s content in these mentalities.

Young artist Merve Üstünalp takes part in the exhibition with her brand new portraits. Her piece in the exhibition recreates in sewing and in all their expressions, the portrait of two couples, which the artist found in a second-hand wallet. In the work by Merve’s guest artist Duygu Sabancılar, however, we cannot see the faces of the characters. Displaying cultural Turkish phrases such as “Aşk olsun”, “Afiyet olsun” and “Yine bekleriz” on familiar wrapping paper in her work titled “Afiyet Olsun” (“Bon Appetit”) from the series Those Promising, she casts a critical and ironic light on Turkey’s politicians who keep confronting the public with ‘promises, promises’.