İstanbul Modern offers a breakdown, starting with the 1960’s and extending to the 2010’s, of the works of Mehmet Güleryüz, who has acquired a special and privileged place on the Turkish art scene by his critical and expressionist style, in the “Painter and Painting: A Mehmet Güleryüz Retrospective”.
The exhibition sheds a light on the development and evolution in the pursuit for rich expression, extending from painting to design, from sculpture to gravure, from theater to performance in the works of the artist who expresses the impacts of the socio-cultural and political transformation in Turkey with a critical and ironic tongue in his figure-based works.
The retrospective, the curatorship of which has been assumed by the Istanbul Modern Director Levent Çalıkoğlu; uses a chronological flow in presenting the unique image typology of Mehmet Güleryüz, who transfers the complex processes in the will of an individual to create himself as shaped by family, social conditions, socio-economic and environmental influences, nature-man, class controversies and existence problems, onto his works by a sharp observation power.
The “Painter and Painting” retrospective also includes important researches and specimens of the art of sculpture by Güleryüz since the 1970s, as well as his designs and paintings. The collection that has emerged by scanning nearly forty design books and numerous independent designs of Mehmet Güleryüz, also reveals the adventure of his designs extending over sixty years. It reflects the inner world of the artist, his enthusiasms, sorrows, rages and revolts.
At the exhibition, which will remain open until June 28 at the İstanbul Modern Termed Exhibitions Hall, nearly 150 works of Güleryüz come together with almost 200 of his designs that are offered as a multimedia presentation.
