Panorama Arcade: Elif Uras
Galerist is pleased to present ‘Panorama Pasajı’ (Panorama Arcade), Elif Uras’s second solo show at the gallery from April 17 to May 16, 2009. The show will consist of new paintings, drawings and Iznik chini sculptures.
The exhibition takes its title from ‘The Arcade Project/Passagen-Werk’, the unfinished masterwork of the renowned German philosopher and literary critic, Walter Benjamin. The Parisian arcades, which Benjamin perceived as “the original temple of commodity capitalism” at the turn of the 20th century, also appeared at the same time in Beyoglu, Istanbul amidst similar architectural and socio-economic conditions. The arcades and the palatial art nouveau apartment buildings that supported these structures brought an early wave of Western modernism into Istanbul’s historic and traditional fabric. At the beginning of the 21st century, as we continue to experience Benjamin’s dialectic between the “newest” and the “always the same”, Uras also seeks to explore areas of slippage between modernism and tradition.
The paintings conflate Western modernism with the bright colors and ornamentational tradition of Turkish and Islamic art. Uras creates complex, indeterminate, yet overtly feminized spaces which, while referencing art history and contemporary media, remain very much her own. Imbuing her work with cultural details that allude to the ‘phantasmagoria’ of the leisure economy, Uras challenges the myths and stereotypes that dominate the relationship between the East and the West, including principles such as liberalism, capitalism, and secularism that are generally attributed to the Western cannon. Uras will also present Iznik chini sculptures that merge traditional vocabulary with Western figurative sculpture.
Elif Uras was born in Ankara, and lives and works in New York and Istanbul. She studied economics and law before receiving her Masters in Fine Arts from Columbia University in 2003. Her work was included in "Greater New York" 2005 at P.S.1/MoMa, New York. Uras has mounted solo exhibitions at Smith-Stewart, New York, Kirkhoff, Copenhagen, Gavlak, West Palm Beach and Kenny Schachter/ROVE, New York. Her work has also been exhibited at Proje 4L/Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art, Istanbul, Mary Boone Gallery, New York, Greene Naftali, New York and Andrew Kreps, New York.
