Toygun Özdemir, Mesut Öztürk LISTE Showtime

At 2022 edition of LISTE, Öktem Aykut presents works by Toygun Özdemir and Mesut Öztürk, two contemporary positions that entail naive yet refined interpretations of Turkish academic tradition. The presentation will gather Özdemir's new oil paintings and Öztürk's ceramic pieces from three different ongoing series.

Either in his landscapes or in his works of portraiture and still lifes, Özdemir draws attention to the capabilities of change and transformation within nature, humans and objects. He conjures up characters enmeshed in the complexity of the 21st century, rendering them in absurd and paradoxical situations that are reflective of the artist’s idiosyncratic dark humour.

Based on his experience in architecture and on his interest in archeology, Mesut Öztürk presents forms that refer to the visual traditions of ancient civilizations. The Halka series reinterprets the qualities of functionality, abstraction and ornamentation inherent in ancient findings. The Revak series questions the formal and proportional traditions in the history of architecture of Roman and Ottoman heritage.

Toygun Özdemir's narrative style and his use of figures, together with Mesut Öztürk's experiments with form and abstraction, provide rich references to the previous generations in Turkish painting, sculpture and ceramics. Yet they certainly belong to and represent a new generation of artists who have emancipated themselves from the weight of questions regarding any Occidentalist or Orientalist conditionings that has come to haunt the Turkish modern and contemporary art circles.

Their subject matters point to quotidian themes, and their use of color together with their deliberate unassertive styles of expressions, make their works both distinctly reserved, yet accessible. Mesut Öztürk's pieces of ceramics illuminate the abstract aspects in Toygun Özdemir's works on canvas, and Özdemir's paintings reveal the pop characteristics of Öztürk's simple architectural forms. They both incorporate ornamental, functional and decorative decisions in an open-ended experimentality.