Art On İstanbul adds a thematic exhibition series to its gallery program with the group exhibition “Part-Whole.” Focusing on how the part-whole relationship is established in artistic production, the exhibition presents both new works and selected pieces from the artists’ earlier periods in the accompanying catalogue. Featuring Ahmet Elhan, Gülsün Karamustafa, Ülgen Semerci, Mithat Şen, Burcu Yağcıoğlu, Ekrem Yalçındağ, and Begüm Yamanlar, the exhibition is on view at Art On İstanbul from March 29 to April 29, 2018.
The part-whole issue, almost a necessary relationship in art-making, manifests for each artist with different periods and mediums, yet maintains similar characteristics as a guiding principle. This relationship, which exists almost as intrinsic knowledge within the artwork, can align with the artist’s worldview, forming a coherent conceptual thread.
Gülsün Karamustafa’s work “Altar” from her previously exhibited Promised Paintings series at Europale, is a whole composed of eleven parts but can also be sold individually. When a piece is sold, the artist replaces it with a new one. In this way, Karamustafa disrupts the indivisible sanctity of the artwork while allowing for a flexible, dynamic, and ever-changing composition.
Another work in which parts change and complement each other is Mithat Şen’s Body III Series (1996). Designed as a series of twelve postcards, this work allows the viewer to actively participate in completing the piece. For the Part-Whole exhibition, the series, in which Şen disassembles his distinctive schema and reconstructs it in three layers of color, was reproduced as a diasec print.
Ahmet Elhan’s Notes from Above series, described by the artist as liberating for his own creative process, consists of twelve compositions formed by combining randomly captured photo fragments into abstract forms. These pieces empty the artist’s visual memory of daily images and, in a sense, cleanse his production channels.
Burcu Yağcıoğlu, who combines sketches and found imagery into collages and treats the paper surface as another component of the work, examines the keystone and its structure capable of supporting the whole without a base in a piece being shown for the first time at Part-Whole.
Begüm Yamanlar’s video works, created by sequentially arranging photographic frames, aim to evoke for the viewer a sense of a whole that is ultimately unattainable.
Ekrem Yalçındağ, who constructs his paintings by repeating his distinctive motifs, presents Self-Portrait-1 for the first time in the Part-Whole exhibition. In these paintings, where the parts refer only to themselves and the larger whole they belong to, Yalçındağ emphasizes the infinite nature of the motif and the notion that all of his works collectively constitute a single whole, including the artist himself.
Ülgen Semerci transforms accumulated found imagery, personal photographs, sketches, and paintings into a kind of alphabet, from which she forms words and, at times, constructs polyptych-like sentences. In the work presented in the exhibition, she applies the fractal structure of part-whole relationships to question the interplay between parts and the whole in painting, carrying the principles of natural deviations and transformation over time into her artistic process.