Featuring the recent works of Istanbul based artist Murat Şahinler, the exhibition titled “I have a feeling” opens at Pilot and Co-Pilot Galleries on February 21 and can be visited until March 23. Şahinler’s painting practice, which he structures with conceptual angles by drawing every day and changing the surface constantly, emerges as a multiplex grammar woven with various narratives.  

 

The underlying conception at Pilot Gallery brings to the foreground one side of Şahinler’s painting, the different stages of being an adult-man and aging, and the perception of the body that shifts according to gender and socio-economics. The exhibition at Co-Pilot on the other hand, is structured around the artist’s 6 meter wide painting titled “Autobiography”, in which he integrates excerpts of his various works from the past to the present. The painting that establishes its own cultural universe with grotesque and neo-gothic elements is accompanied by an original sound composition by Cem Ömeroğlu and Şahinler. 

 

According to painter Leyla Gediz and curator Misal Adnan Yıldız who shared the exhibition preparation process with Şahinler, there are many operational reasons through which this exhibition will refresh our relationship with painting: 

 

a) The unfinished/unfinishable nature of Şahinler’s ever changing paintings; their narrative transformations of various dimensions, and his painting emerging as a proposal of grammars (different language structures) rather than a single grammar, 

b) autobiographic elements, personal references (records) in his painting, and their states of collision with that which is public, 

c) psychological, social and cultural traces of being an adult and a man today, which can be perused through the paintings’ surface and can immediately be recognized when viewed as it were a social data; and their relationship with gender and collective memory,

d) questions running parallel to his practice of painting; Şahinler’s relationship with sculpture, sound, poetry, his exercises in architectural thinking, spatial projects and installation solutions/questions passing through his painting,

e) his sketchbooks that are a constant part of his daily life…

 

Murat Şahinler 

Born in İstanbul in 1961, Murat Şahinler graduated from Mimar Sinan University Faculty of Fine Arts, Department of Sculpture, upon which he continued his academic studies at the Utrecht Fine Arts Academy Department of Urban Interior Design (1989-1993) in the Netherlands.  Working in many diverse mediums ranging from drawing to painting, animation to sculpture, Şahinler is also renowned for his theater stage designs, as well as his public space projects and collective works he produces in the architectural context. Following his solo exhibition at Galerist in 2003, recent exhibitions the artist has participated in include, among others: “Organized Conflict”, Proje4L, İstanbul (2003), “Originality: Contemporary and Locality” 1st International Beijing Biennial (2003), “Call Me İstanbul”, ZKM, Karlsruhe (2004), “İstanbul Pedestrian Exhibitions 2” (2005), “Urban Reviews”, ifa gallery, Berlin and Stuttgart (2004), “Dynamics of the Urban Culture”, 9th Havana Biennial (2006), “Modern and Beyond” Santral İstanbul (2007-2008), “INDEX, Zeichen des Alltags”, Kunstraum Porcia, Vienna (2008), “Wandering Lines: Towards A New Culture of Space”, 5th SCAPE Christchurch Biennial of Art in Public Space (2008), “Bridges to İstanbul”, Centro Cultural De Belem, Lisbon (2010) and “Double Take / İkinci Bakış”, 2nd Mardin Biennial (2012).