September August 5 – September 10, 2020, Vision Art Platform is very happy to bring together a special selection of the works of Emel Åžahinkaya, one of the most valuable women artists of Turkey, which we lost last year, with the audience at the exhibition space at 42 Maslak Dec.
The exhibition, which sheds light on the works of the artist, especially in the period 1988 – 2008, is the first exhibition held after the decoupling of the artist.
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Born in 1957 in Istanbul, master painter Emel Åžahinkaya, who graduated from the painting department of the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts in 1982, NeÅŸet Günal workshop, continued his work in his workshop in Bodrum GümüÅŸluk from 1996 until his death.
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Throughout his life, the canvas of Emel Åžahinkaya, who described painting as an existential necessity, has been a space of life and knowledge. ‘Who is the painter?‘he made a pretty accurate and simple definition by answering his question’ no one can stop making pictures'. For Emel Åžahinkaya, all his accumulation, observations, equipment, emotions and questions were the paraphernalia of his painting.
Emel Åžahinkaya, a painter who stubbornly intensifies and diversifies his art life without leaving the issue of painting for 35 years, continued to develop the plastic of her works and deepen the meanings in every period.
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"Emel Åžahinkaya-Günsür has been adhering to his own craftsmanship for nearly a quarter of a century, to the tools and possibilities of his own Metier. It seems easy to do (and say). But the last thirty years in the arts were a period that provoked the artist not to do so: there was a vertigo, everyone was called out, even forced, to go beyond their knowledge and abilities. There were those who resisted, some of them dried up, some of them resisted like Åžahinkaya-Günsür and succeeded. (...)”
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Orhan Koçak
The artist, whose paintings have always been the subject of gardens, hides a poem behind all his works. In Emel Åžahinkaya's paintings, which are inspired primarily by words, objects are like carefully selected words of poetry. Her paintings, which have a transcendent poetic image, conceptual impressions of the object itself in the background of the scene, are derived only by form, not by plastic, but by content.
For Åžahinkaya, who portrays her gardens as a waiting and the most peaceful form of the love door of the universe, cypresses in her paintings are words beyond the forms of gardens, women, villages and tree bottoms in the first place. These gardens, which are filled with rich vegetation as well as various trees, are not a paradise, but a sanctuary in which the artist tries to take refuge in the open air. The gardens, with all their violence, horror, vulnerability, childhood and enthusiasm, are an invitation to the inner world of the artist. While the viewer is deeply connected to the work, he shares the artist's ‘disintegrating universe, crumbling integrity’, ‘violence, enthusiasm and self-transitions’.
Cemal Süreyya calls’ gardens of horror ' for his gardens; that horror, on the one hand, is the artist's excessive enthusiasm for nature.
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Fear, horror, light-time, light-integrity, color and pleasure full of these timeless, space-free Gardens; man in childhood, nature is the space of play and experience, the relationship with nature is intact is the place of pure state for Emel Åžahinkaya.
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In her paintings, where light plays a major role, the artist sought the tragic in light to the extent that it strengthens the shadow. He invites light into his painting, not according to the laws of optics, but as long as it contributes to the expression and expression of emotions. Colors also find a place in ÅŸahinkaya's canvases in this way. It's like forms, things, light flowing into each other. These are pictures of someone seeing with their body. With intuition in the flow of his wrist, the texture of the paint, which spreads with equal intensity to the entire picture, has a material aesthetic that does not prevent Åžahinkaya's figures fusing with the floor from coming to the fore.
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“ ‘What is a canvas painting? I tried the possibilities , conditions, possibilities of an object that accidentally appeared in front of me on an increasingly dominant white field that resisted despite its empty appearance-with the limited material I had - less could be enough. Let's just say I studied Earth shapes or something. The painter's usual ‘ penetration ' history, habit... After this strange intertwining and research that cannot be considered very morphological , there are little lights left that fall here and there. That's how the last canvas was formed. An accident on
then there's the silence.But it's not the wash , it's the Koran.it looks like an accident. This subject, which has been tried in very different and disconnected times (such as), can be looked at again in the same space as a journey of understanding.’
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I wrote this short for the Shebboy exhibition. Why not apply to every exhibition? Let's say it was a concept I encountered this time; time. The process of reading a white paper evokes a sense of time , and I think the emphasis on light shadow on canvases also leads to an intuition about time and space.Maybe it's just me. Maybe it's all an effort against the indifference of nature that I can't get enough to look at.”
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Emel Åžahinkaya