Galerist is pleased to present a range of works by Yeşim Akdeniz and Nuri Kuzucan for Abu Dhabi Art, 2020. Akdeniz and Kuzucan both investigate the ways in which architecture can reflect modern human condition by depicting fragments from daily life, objects and buildings we encounter every day, while questioning our exchanges with them. Kuzucan reflects our inner-self through depictions of exterior spaces, Akdeniz does so with the familiar interiors and textures. This presentation mainly focuses on our relationship, as humans, to the world around us and how we perceive and interiorize it.
Akdeniz’s new body of work titled “Radical Selfcare” involves upholstered painting-objects that make us think of protection, comfort, softness. The texture of quilt hinders intimacy and security, reminds us of a home while her paintings communicate a surrealist and dreamy world, visions from a parallel and imagined universe. Born in Izmir, Turkey in 1978, Yeşim Akdeniz’s work contains symbolic narratives that make use of recognisable and existing forms of cultural production, often emerging from, or associated with exponents of modernism. Her subjects are not human but rather suggestions or insinuations of humanly behaviour or habits, objects and architectures or animals or parts of the human body, often floating on obscure surfaces with unknown sources of light.
As curator and writer Ariane Koek states; “Nuri’s buildings become homes for the unconscious-screens for the projections of our innermost thoughts and feelings. They are places where our feelings are formed and reformed. Ironically, the blank rectangles in his paintings could either be buildings in the distance or windows that are very close to the viewer. And these spaces, whatever they are – walls or windows - are blanks where we can project our own internal states.” Nuri Kuzucan, born in 1971 in Zara, explores urban landscapes and modern architecture through abstract forms that resemble masses of concrete. The artist’s main concern is with how the modern city affects the dweller and unravels the solidute that results to it. Throughout his works, Kuzucan imagines a three-dimensional space within two-dimensional space, and excels in doing so with his personal power of observation and a contemporary reflection on the culture of seeing.