İhsan Oturmak Series of Open Strategies

İhsan Oturmak has come to develop an authentic figurative language in his paintings, in which he treats vital societal issues with an ontological and phenomenological approach. In his own words, ''the togetherness of the body and soul relates to the being, the togetherness of thinking and technique relates to the character of the work.''

Oturmak's technique may particularly distinguish itself through its use of light and the way it represents human bodies. His paintings give clarity to the dilemmas inherent in the discussion concerning identity and class in Turkish society. Oturmak's vision emancipates this discussion from its societal and cultural load and positions it within a more ontological and existentialist framework. This demands both, the firm alliance of painterly thinking and technique, together with the sharp and brave approach to the dense deadlocks that define the contemporary Turkish society of late modernity. These characteristics inherent in Oturmak's artistic take imbue his work with a unique benignity and straightness towards the contemporary human condition.

The works in Series of Open Strategies are centred around the division of roles according to the disciplinary mechanisms. Who owns the eyes that watch, judge and chasten? Who may claim the hands that examine, inspect and punish? In Series of Open Strategies, Oturmak attempts to discuss how these eyes and hands have come to institutionalise in the society. His works reveal scenes and sequences where the established casting is reversed or undermined. How do the power structures construct and deconstruct constantly, when two police officers inspect each other's bodies? When two groups of police force pull out guns against each other, how shall the citizen react against them? Is indifference a crime, when people helplessly watch a head-on accident of two luxurious cars? Why do the scrapped vehicles of ambulance or fire brigade disappoint us? When living bodies that surrender for inspection become sculptures, do they become unique or anonymous?

The way the bodies have come to be represented in Oturmak's paintings and sculptures help the societal issues materialise and these bodies at the end even turn into icons for these issues. The societal problems thus become more concrete and tangible, they get isolated and individual. In Series of Open Strategies, scenes that are rather peculiar to contemporary Turkish society crystallise challenges immanent to the global human condition and contain them withinside individual bodies. Is it possible to overcome these challenges through transforming the bodies and liberating them from the historical load, or iconoclasm is the only way?