Art On Istanbul presents Olcay Kuş’s solo exhibition A Place Without a Chair at Art On Pera from
December 9, 2023 – January 6, 2024.
Ilhan Mimaroğlu (1926–2012)—composer, critic, and one of the pioneers of electronic music, as well as the son of Mimar Kemaleddin Bey, a leading architect of the late Ottoman and early Republican periods—coined the term “doorstep art” for the street art he encountered in New York after settling there in 1959. He documented these works in a publication, emphasizing that their defining feature was not merely that they were performed on the street, but that the creators had been “expelled” or excluded from the interior by others. Such doorstep art could be ignored by the masses or acknowledged in various ways: by writing about it, photographing it, or, as Olcay Kuş does, appropriating its formal qualities and transferring them onto the canvas. All such gestures acknowledge and celebrate the presence of what was originally anonymous.
Born in 1985 in İzmir, Olcay Kuş first noticed this phenomenon in Istanbul after completing her
education at Dokuz Eylül University, during her time as an assistant in Kemal Seyhan’s studio,
particularly around Rumeli Han and its surroundings. In a 2020 interview, she recalled:
"I would watch every day from the studio window how the wall opposite changed, producing perfect visuals—images that could shift with even a single gust of wind. I found the graffiti ironic and yet so real. At the same time, I saw how indifferent the passersby were to this aesthetic. It was such a dynamic wall and street. Back then, I was more focused on creating surfaces. My main problem was how to show what I saw with the same or similar effect."
Influenced by doorstep art and driven by the desire to create her own walls, Kuş’s translation of this impulse onto the painting surface necessitates meticulous attention to both the base and its layers. She does not exempt herself from this rigor: before making a stencil, the ground must be constructed, and even the stencil itself requires careful consideration. These two axes reveal the painterly quality of her work. Moreover, there is no rule that every wall—or, in this case, canvas—must receive a stencil. The ground itself can function as a fixed moment within social and personal history. In such a scenario, painting as a memory object concludes spontaneously as the painter’s privilege: the artist renders the individual visible to themselves, while simultaneously opening a space for the viewer.
Indeed, the journeys the viewer encounters in Olcay Kuş’s paintings are internal explorations, akin to reading the patterns of a divination. Her works transform observation into intimate reflection, inviting the audience to find a personal path within the layered, constructed surfaces.
