Painter Murat Şahinler's exhibition displays society and loneliness in daily life

ISTANBUL

Murat Şahinler aims to discover a new language that is hidden in daily life while trying to show the hidden images of one’s daily routine.

It is not easy to depict a certain point of view with a method of painting. However, the works of Murat Şahinler, now on display at Istanbul’s Pilot Gallery, are proving quite the opposite. Şahinler’s paintings and drawings show audiences the point of view of the artist on manhood, society and loneliness with images of daily lives that we encounter each day. Şahinler aims to discover a new language that is hidden in daily life while trying to show the hidden images of one’s daily routine. 

Şahinler’s paintings create characters, just like a literary oeuvre does, said one of the curators of the exhibition, Misal Adnan Yıldız. That’s why the works and the story of them can only be understood with a touch of another artist, Leyla Gediz, who is the other curator of the show.

Gediz is a talented Turkish artist who is famous for her paintings in the Turkish contemporary art scene. In recent years, painting as an act of art has been gone through hard times and begun to be understood as a medium that has become a commodity. However, this exhibition demonstrates just the opposite. In Şahinler’s paintings, there are many important aspects that cannot make the painting a commodity.

Details of Şahinler

The Yıldız and Gediz duo try to approach the display and curation of paintings in a more alternative way. Instead of hanging the paintings side by side, they try different displaying techniques. In this case, the life of the artist becomes important. The exhibition is full of details on Şahinler, such as his character, his daily life, how he works, what he thinks about manhood, how he reacts to the place that he lives and so on.

“This was an important part of the exhibition,” said Yıldız, noting that for them it was a must to reflect the artist’s life in the exhibition as it is the only way to understand the painting style of Şahinler.  
The combination of Şahinler’s drawing notebooks, notes and pieces of pages from his drawing process are displayed on a table in the gallery, and the aim of the installation, which is accompanied by his large-dimensioned drawings, tells the story of his painting process and the characters he uses in the paintings.

A six-meter-long painting of Şahinler gathers together his characters, himself and his way of approach to life. Even though all of them show his life and his own language in art, the exhibition displays how Yıldız, as a curator, and how Gediz, as an artist, approach painting and choose to reflect it at an exhibition.

The nature of Şahinler’s ever-changing paintings reveals his style and language in art as a narrative transformation. As a result, the autobiographic elements and personal references in his paintings show audiences it is important to know the life of the artist as they discover his or her art. The life of an artist is also revealed by the psychological, social and cultural traces of being an adult and a man today; at the same time, they can also be perused through the paintings’ surface.

The questions running parallel to his practice of painting; Şahinler’s relationship with sculpture, sound and poetry; his exercises in architectural thinking and spatial projects and installation solutions/questions passing through his paintings are all important parts of the exhibition, according to the curators.