MYSTICAL CIRCLES
Hilma Af Klint
She is the pioneer of abstract art not only in terms of as a woman artist but also being a leading figure in art world.
Af Klint was born in Stockholm in 1862 and went on to study at the city’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts. She soon established herself as a respected painter in Stockholm, exhibiting deftly rendered figurative paintings .During these years she also became deeply involved in spiritualism and her connection to the Creator was her fundamental motive in creating her abstracts.
When Hilma af Klint began creating radically abstract paintings in 1906, they were like little that had been seen before: bold, colorful, and untethered from any recognizable references to the physical world. Although her colour palette is softer and more pastel than mine (I am little more fauvist in that respective), her way of expressing her ideas through colours seems to be the same with my ambition to do so.
It was years before Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and others would take similar strides to rid their own artwork of representational content. What I really find interesting about her is while many of her better-known contemporaries published manifestos and exhibited widely, af Klint kept her groundbreaking paintings largely private. (I would like to ask her why she did so.)
She rarely exhibited them and convinced the world was not yet ready to understand her work (She was right), and stipulated that it not be shown for twenty years following her death. Ultimately, her work was all but unseen until 1986, and only over the subsequent three decades have her paintings and works on paper begun to receive serious attention. Currently, her masterpieces are on showcase in Guggenheim Gallery receiving much appreciation. I wish she could see it or maybe she is already seeing.
Fahrelnissa Zeid
Zeid is one of my greatest inspirations with all her dedication to art. She, as a Turkish artist, best known for her large-scale abstractpaintings with kaleidoscopic patterns. Also using drawings, lithographs, and sculptures, her work blended elements of Islamic and Byzantine art with abstraction and other influences from the West.
As we are both fed with a rich historical and geographical heritage of Turkey, It is inavitable that there are commont points in our art. I am also influenced by islamic and oriental patterns and colours. Abstract expressionism is the way to narrate our stories. My "Junctions" series which I inspired from London railways series, form similar patterns with Zeid's kaleidoscopic shapes.
I also appreciate Zeid for her being the first women to go to art school in Istanbul and later in her life starting her own art schools in Amman.
Although she lived decades ago, she had the spirit of a 21 cc contemporary artist. She lived in different cities and became part of the avant-garde scenes in Istanbul, pre-war Berlin and post-war Paris.
Her work has been exhibited at various institutions in Paris, New York, and London, including the Institute of Contemporary Art in the 1970s, she moved to Amman, Jordan, where she initiated an art school. In 2017, Tate Modern in London organized a major retrospective of the artist and called her "one of the greatest female artists of the 20th.
Vassily Kandinsky
Kandinsky was a Russian painter and art theorist.
One of the pioneers of abstract modern art, Wassily Kandinsky exploited the evocative interrelation between color and form to create an aesthetic experience that engaged the sight, sound, and emotions of the public. He believed that total abstraction offered the possibility for profound, transcendental expression and that copying from nature only interfered with this process. Highly inspired to create art that communicated a universal sense of spirituality, he innovated a pictorial language that only loosely related to the outside world, but expressed volumes about the artist's inner experience. His visual vocabulary developed through three phases, shifting from his early, representational canvases and their divine symbolism to his rapturous and operatic compositions, to his late, geometric and biomorphic flat planes of color. Kandinsky's art and ideas inspired many generations of artists, from his students at the Bauhaus to the Abstract Expressionists after World War II.
Painting was, above all, deeply spiritual for Kandinsky. He sought to convey profound spirituality and the depth of human emotion through a universal visual language of abstract forms and colors that transcended cultural and physical boundaries.Kandinsky viewed non-objective, abstract art as the ideal visual mode to express the "inner necessity" of the artist and to convey universal human emotions and ideas. He viewed himself as a prophet whose mission was to share this ideal with the world for the betterment of society.Kandinsky viewed music as the most transcendent form of non-objective art - musicians could evoke images in listeners' minds merely with sounds. He strove to produce similarly object-free, spiritually rich paintings that alluded to sounds and emotions through a unity of sensation.
Sarah Morris
Morris is both a painter and filmmaker (producer), seeing the two media as interconnected as I do. In those terms, I speak the same language with Morris who describes the dual processes as “two sides of the same coin”, creating the paintings and films (which reference one another visually and thematically) simultaneously. As a journalist, I also covered stories for news bulletins; the theme was not artistic, though. However, it is one of my intentions to produce artistic films or documentaries.
Morris is best known for her abstract paintings that feature bright color fields and graphic line work, often referencing elements of architecture and taking titles from bureaucratic institutions.
Since the mid-1990s, Sarah Morris has been making abstract paintings and films to investigate what she describes as “urban, social and bureaucratic typologies”. These works, based on different cities, are derived from close inspection of architectural details combined with a critical sensitivity to the psychology of a city and its key protagonists. Urbanization and human relation to the city is also my interest. Despite the differences in our stand points, our crave for creativity is the very embodiment of “Phenomenological Life” as the philosopher Michel Henry defines the term as feeling and experiencing oneself in every point of its being.
Yayoi Kusama
Yayoi was born in Japan in 1929. She loved drawing and painting and although her parents didn't want her to be an artist, she was determined. When her mum tore up her drawings, she made more. When she could not afford to buy art materials, she used mud and old sacks to make art.
Eventually Yayoi Kusama persuaded her parents to let her go to art school and study painting.
In the late 1950s she moved to New York as lots of the most exciting art seemed to be happening there. It must have been a bit frightening arriving in a big city with such a different culture from what she knew. But she was determined to conquer New York. She later wrote about her feisty attitude: ‘I would stand up to them all with a single polka dot’.
She met and inspired important artists including Donald Judd, Andy Warhol and Joseph Cornell, and her art was a part of exciting art developments such as pop art and minimalism. She was also one of the first artists to experiment with performance and action art.
As well as being an art pioneer, Yayoi Kusama put her creativity into other things including music, design, writing and fashion. Her interdisciplinary intrigues me. Art is finding the most artistic way to express your world view and to make what is abstract (inside) concrete (outside).
Leonardo Da Vinci
Da Vinci was one of the genious and mysterious painters in the history. Although he depicted what his age necessiated and with the technicality of his age, he often made use of semiotics , symbolism, numerology that often made subject to sinema and literature. Halo was only one of them. Halo, also called nimbus, in art, radiant circle or disk surrounding the head of a holy person, a representation of spiritual character through the symbolism of light. I use a gold cycle in my abstracts to symbolise goodness and protection. I also refer to the Renasaince art with an appropriation that is the use of pre-existing objects or images with little or no transformation applied to them in contemporary fine arts.
Richard Wright
Wright is best known for his site-specific yet transient works that unite painting with graphic and typographic elements, charging architectural spaces with a fourth dimension of subtle yet extreme optical complexity and subverting the traditionally static dynamic between painting and viewer. His paintings and applied metal-leaf schemes connote memory and ephemerality—these works are short-lived, oftentimes lasting only as long as the exhibition. Alongside works on interior surfaces such as walls and ceilings, Wright’s works on paper encompass a range of handmade prints, ink drawings, gilding, and watercolors.
Agnes Martin
Agnes Martin, in a career spanning five decades, became known for her square canvasses, meticulously rendered grids and repeat stripes, though this exhibition will also present her lesser-known early works, experiments with mixed media, and works on paper. Martin thought of her works as studies in the pursuit of perfection. She had a very optimistic perspective through life that she chose to reflect in simplicity on her canvas.
She once said, "When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not just in the eye. It is in the mind. It is our positive response to life." which is exactly what I think of art should be doing.
While there is enough ugliness on earth , art should be depicting even the ugliest thing in the most beautiful way.
Sonia Delaunay
Art and fashion has always taken the path hand in hand. Sonia Delaunay was one of the female artists who applied her Works to textile and fabric. I am also interested in fabric use form y art. My best preference is silk. I use silk for digital prints of my ink Works and designed my own type scarves. Delaunay was a Ukrainian-born French artist, who spent most of her working life in Paris and, with her husband Robert Delaunay and others, cofounded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colors and geometric shapes, mostly circles, like i do. Her work extends to painting, textile design and stage set design. Her work in modern design included the concepts of geometric abstraction, the integration of furniture, fabrics, wall coverings, and clothing.
SURREALISTIC PROJECTIONS
René Magritte
Magritte is one my favorite painters.
Surely the most celebrated Belgian artist of the 20th century, he has achieved great popular acclaim for his idiosyncratic approach to Surrealism. To support himself he spent many years working as a commercial artist, producing advertising and book designs, and this most likely shaped his fine art, which often has the abbreviated impact of an advertisement. While some French Surrealists led ostentatious lives, Magritte preferred the quiet anonymity of a middle-class existence, a life symbolized by the bowler-hatted men that often populate his pictures. In later years, he was castigated by his peers for some of his strategies (such as his tendency to produce multiple copies of his pictures), yet since his death his reputation has only improved. Conceptual artists have admired his use of text in images, and painters in the 1980s admired the provocative kitsch of some of his later work.
I find him witty and thought-provoking in terms of the images he chooses and combines. Often depicting ordinary objects in an unusual context, his work is known for challenging observers' preconditioned perceptions of reality. In my collection, too, I wanted to make the viewer to think about what is seen. Like the media theory derived from Jean Boudrillard’s smilacrum, what we see is not real; however it becomes our reality after a while. And it is hyper reality or if we adapt it to painting, it is called sürrealist. This is what I see in MAgritte’s paintings. Although , It is weird to see an object not in its usual form or place, after a while you get used to it.
When it comes to my association of this concept with the children in Yemen, I have to tell the world is turning a blind eye to what is happening in Yemen: starvation, malnutrition and the çivil war. As the people of an alter modern age, we act as if it is normal and just do nothing. Thus, this work is a critique to the alter modern man who lives in a digital world in smart phones and ignores the reality.
Tanya Bruguera is a contemporary Cuban artists who also defines herself as activist. Migrations, crowds, biosociology -human body in numbers- are main themes she indicates and highlights. She likes integration of the viewer and interaction with the art creation, which has a reference to the isolation of human soul in today’s society who are lacking physical affection and closeness. Bruguera performs art at a wide range and in a multidisciplinary way as a contemporary artist. Performance, events, action, film, installation, sculpture are fields she produces. It is a big inspiration to me as well because I believe art and painting is not merely imprisoned to canvas and frames. An artist’s imagination should be much beyond it. From an aesthetic relational perspective, installations and conceptual sculptures and integration of an art work with people support and strengthen the meaning of my painting and my goals I target to achieve through painting.
MY ART, MY HEART
Composition Lee Krasner, American, 1908 - 1984/Philadelphia Museum of Art - Collections Object : Composition
Lee Krasner, Untitled (Little Image), 1949.
Oil on canvas, 24 x 48 in.
The Jewish Museum, New York
LEE KRASHNER
Krashner is one of the pioneering women artists who has contributed to the modernisation of art. Abstract expressionist mind of her also served as an inspiration fairy to her husband Pullock as well who is also one of the greatest influences on my art in terms of the free spirit he reflected on his action painting.
I find Krashner very bold as she never avoid renewing herself or destroying her paintings for new ideas. She sometimes reworked on her pieces more than once and occasionally destroying whole bodies of work. This obsessive self-cannibalization was far from detrimental, however, for it led to some of Krasner's most beautiful and captivating works. This is what I also do with my paintings. I sometimes paint the whole finished canvas and redo it again. This is a call and the artist should pursue her call.
David Hockney
Large Interior
Beach House
Richard Gray Gallery
Without a dispute, Hockney is a legend. His bright colours and fovist approach are the most dominant characteristics of his art that impressed my style. In my final project, I focused on interiors as a result of an idea that I want to put my products of art into a room along with some prominent artists of modern art. Thus, I was inspired by Hockney`s interior series. Morever, it is another motive of his style that he uses painting in a painting mostly without a human figurative.
Hochney`s talent for creating a visually immersive experience for viewers through his paintings gives him the skill to challenge traditional interior design concepts; such as asymmetrical balanced as well as repetition and smooth transitions between lines and perspectives. Although my interiors have a more realistic look, I have the tendency and strong appeal to his art.
Hurvin Anderson
HURVIN ANDERSON Some People (Welcome Series)(2004
Hurvin Anderson
Afrosheen
2009
Oil on canvas
250 x 208 cm
Hurvin AndersonJersey
2008
In Anderson’s interiors, I see dissembles into a weight-defying field of shapes, textures, and colours, its homey clutter, so intimately familiar, is made surreal and dream-like. Executed in large scale, Anderson’s canvas retains an innocent domestic charm while asserting a commanding and sophisticated engagement with abstraction. His colour palette is full of bold red and blocks of fovist colours coinciding with spatial perspective. grey and white are giving a sense of fresness after the cumulation of many objects. I like his use of details and objects like in Hobb`s The Ambassadors, it gives the sense of a store in which you want to discover and touch every item. There is a good balance of figures and space.
Briget Riley
Traces
Measure for Measure
Blaze
Bridget Riley has been an inspiration for me with her dots, cirles and spiral that create a sense of illusion in the eye and as an artists make me question the wit behind her creations. In my circles , I am deeply affected by her philosophy and techniquality.
Damian Russel
Have you ever wondered how Hockney`s interiors would look like in real? Damian Russel , a photography artist has created interiors in cooperation with interior architectures. The colours and stlings are also very inspirational for me.
Bernard Buffet
La Baume : l entree
Intimement
Salle à manger et piscine de la baume
, 1988
I came across to Buffet paintings in an auction in Istanbul and fell in love with the uniqueness of the technique. As I did some reading and search on him, I found out he was keen on interior painting. Considering the style of his time, painting in a painting is unavoidable. I do not think his intention was to give place to some paintings as I do, but the similarities between our interest made me happy. His countering technique and palette choice are far away from mine, drawings look quite illustrative, however, he is a great inspiration for me.