Evren Sungur’s first solo exhibition at Art On İstanbul, “Personator,” can be visited at the gallery’s Tepebaşı space from October 21 to November 25, 2017.
Sungur, the only Turkish artist featured in Thames and Hudson’s 100 Painters of Tomorrow, focuses in “Personator” on a new series of paintings featuring fragmented images arranged within prisms. On the large-scale canvases, the artist’s signature thick layers of oil paint, bold and sharp colors, graphic elements, and dense compositions are confined within prism-shaped boundaries delineated by white lines on the surface.
The title “Personator” refers to “an identity-generating machine, a creator of persona.” Sungur’s work addresses humans in search of new identities, using the selected images in his compositions as building blocks for this new persona. The independent images that make up the paintings emerge from memories, dreams, traumas, hopes, experiences, and knowledge—both the artist’s and those inherent to every person—revealing the most intense and fragile moments related to an event or situation.
These independent images, brought together through both analytical and intuitive processes, do not form a conventional narrative; instead, they gain meaning as one delves deeper, like the personal history of a character examined by a psychoanalyst. Although Sungur avoids telling a story through these fragments, the complex imagery invites the viewer to engage with the painting. Within the prisms, the rules of perspective, physical laws, gravity, forces, and true dimensions are not strictly followed, yet the prism itself forms a rigid structure.
Since his first exhibition in 2010, Evren Sungur has developed a distinctive style with bold and sharp colors, rich paint textures, and layered, dense compositions. His works create a compelling space in which human nature, evolution, existence, and power relations are explored through contrasts such as male-female, civil-political, life-death, and nature-human. In this exhibition, the vibrancy and harmony of colors, used in contrast to the drama and negativity of the subject matter, create a lively and hopeful trajectory within the works.