Art On Istanbul is delighted to present Âlem, an exhibition marking the 40th artistic year of Mithat Şen. After a three-year break, the artist returns with new works from his ongoing İstif series, exploring the possibilities and potentials of “âlem” — a word in our culture that encompasses both the known and the unknown, uniting not only humanity and familiar life forms but also those that remain foreign or unfamiliar to us. This holistic understanding of âlem—seeing and grasping everything as one—serves as a guide for experiencing the exhibition.
Hosted by the gallery from September 19 to October 31, the exhibition features the artist’s large-scale works. Centered on the key axes of repetition and variation, Âlem presents the cosmos of Şen’s artistic production while also examining the cause-and-effect relations shaped by this geography’s understanding of the universe.
By employing repetition not in terms of melody but in terms of rhythm, the artist constructs stacked compositions (istif) that stand out through rhythmic recurrence. His works are produced through “a system that allows for different combinations”—a structure that, much like quantum physics, can generate multiple outcomes. Built from parts that ultimately point to a whole, this system echoes the artist’s notion of zikr (remembrance). Just as nature pushes its own boundaries, repeating endlessly to evolve into new forms, Mithat Şen’s paintings evolve by stretching and transforming the principles upon which they are founded.
In the artist’s own words: “Âlem emerged as a counterpart to my mental processes related to the imagination of the universe, as a metaphor for the cosmos itself. There is a cause-and-effect relationship between the cosmological vision of the geography I live in and the way it is perceived and manifested visually. Âlem encompasses this vision. I am painting the image of the geography—by geography, I mean the boundaries of an ancient past.”