Kadir Akyol: "Image As A Phenomenon"

Merve, 2014, Toil and acrylic on canvas, 125×150 cm., (copyright Kadir Akyol).

SOLO EXHIBITION AT GALLERY ARK

22 NOVEMBER – 13 DECEMBER 2014

Gallery ARK, continues to be the heart of the art at Anatolian side of Istanbul at Goztepe, Cemil Topuzlu Street. Gallery ARK, aiming to bring different colors and sounds into Turkey’s art scene, also supports young artists. In this context, the gallery opens Kadir Akyol’s solo exhibition. Akyol has been awarded Rh+ artmagazine’s “2013 Young Artist of the Year”.

Art critic Lütfiye Bozdag, writes these words for Kadir Akyol’s 10th personal exhibition: “Kadir Akyol forms a relationship between the juxtapositions of the past and the future as well as the modern and the traditional within the concept of ‘image as a phenomenon’. In Akyol’s paintings, image appears to be a phenomenon above its real meaning and the traditional similes.

Irrelevant images like media-lace-portrait coming together on the same platform and form a relationship based on opposition helps to form a new reality. While ‘being itself’, this new reality breaks its own actuality through the opposition of the images and gives way to new stories. The relationship between power and authority is interpreted by the media-lace-portrait triangle. Akyol’s use of lace motif in his paintings is a reference to the East-West synthesis. By means of the starting mode of the State TV with a single channel, he refers to the media, which has great influence on the authority of the State.

Our lives are occupied by new technologies, we can judge how TV’s digital coldness and the traditional / warm image of handmade lace have become strangers to one another, how modern and traditional stand across each other in great tension with striking irony.”

Kadir AKYOL’s “Image as a Phenomenon” exhibition will run from 22 November until 13 December 2014 at Gallery Ark.

In addition, Kadir Akyol’s paintings can be viewed in the Gallery biq (berlin istanbul quarter) booth at Contemporary İstanbul 2014 Fair between 13-16 November and in the Gallery Doruk booth at Tuyap Art Fair between 13 to 16 November.