“Pictures of Nothing” will be open until 7 October at Pg Art Gallery. The exhibition is curated by Arie Amaya-Akkermans.
A group exhibition showcasing a historical, methodological and thematic survey of contemporary abstraction, bringing together a multi-generational conversation between artists from different peripheries, forming an expanded picture of the global. “Pictures of Nothing” takes its name from the late Kirk Varnedoe’s eponymous 2006 book, examining the legacy of the abstract form after Pollock. While Varnedoe’s book is explicitly Western-centric, we share with him an opposition to formalism as a pure form; instead we read the abstract in art as an ‘evolving sign system’ that acquires meaning from its social context. This sign system is a multi-sourced, pluralistic and dynamic mechanism able to incorporate a multitude of beginnings.
Pictures of Nothing is primarily an attempt to live in a world without pictures, or, where representation is depleted and how we respond to this condition. We learn from Varnedoe’s book that abstraction is also a search for a temporary degree of meaninglessness; in order to reveal the essential. In the first section of the exhibition, ‘Life without Pictures’, centered on a post-minimalist process-sculpture (2002-2017) by Devran Mursaloğlu we engage with ideas of deep time. These are in turn complemented by works of younger artists related to the nature of space: A fragment from the abolished constellations by Alexandra Paperno and the post-utopian architectures of Amba Sayal-Bennett, as well as Hala Schoukair’s polyhedrons and Sergey Rozhin’s concept of wood.
The second section “Sign-Place Systems”, makes reference to processes of translation and transmission between language and the “event”. The third section, “Historical Dialogues”, begins with the humorous response of Siberian cultural icon Damir Muratov to the legacy of Malevich, but is centered on a bi-generational conversation. In the fourth section, “Formalisms”, dormant debates on the nature of abstraction latently awake, with a slight reference to the much discussed zombie formalism, but with a very different genealogical tree: Young Russian artists Petr Kirusha and Vitaly Barabanov discuss current abstract formalism from different contemporary sources. While the sections overlap, and different readings are possible, it is our belief that ‘Pictures of Nothing’, set in Istanbul against a background of constant transition, demands from the viewer to relate to its abstract signs not as an evasion of the real but as a multidirectional system of thought, able to tackle the social, political and cultural, in an era of profound disembodiment, emotional impoverishment and endless mobility.
