11 March – 15 April 2018
Personal Mythologies
Mark Peet Visser Gallery, ‘s-Hertogenbosch
Epoch’s Dream, 2013, Oil on Canvas, 200 x 60 cm
Free Amazons, 2012, Oil on Canvas, 130 x 130 cm
From God, 2017, Mixed Media, 100 x 100 x 20 cm
Hollow Parting, 2013, Oil on Canvas, 200 x 60 cm
Phoenix’s Feathers, 2012, Oil on Canvas, 100 x 100 cm
Sarayburnu Hill B1, Kostantiniyye Series, 2016, Mixed Media, 140 x 140 x 35 cm
Shamaran’s Secret of Immortality, 2014, Oil on Canvas, 120 x 220 cm
Six-winged Angel, 2017, Oil on Canvas, 100 x 200 cm
Voice of Paradise, 2017, Oil on Canvas, 150 x 150 cm
Zeus’s Reverie, 2017, Oil on Canvas, 100 x 100 cm
Personal Mythologies manifests how the artist reimagines personalistic elements in mythologies in an acutely intricate and bright context. The exhibition consists of works from the hybrid use of metal and mirrors in wall sculptures to the optic and dimensional paintings.
Myth, for Güneştekin, is not only a personalistic history in this sense but also a miraculous personalistic history expressed in graphic forms. The elements he borrows from mythologies represent the configuration of his dreams, his imaginations. By concentrating allegorical and vitally symbolic layers, these are the elements that constructs his mythological universe.
A layer of personalistic presence doubtless rests on all things, and they are nothing other than a person turned inside out. Every single thing can have infinitely diverse forms of expressing its personalistic nature while retaining its identity at the same time. Light and darkness combine to generate visible forms: if there were only light or only darkness, no evident form would be possible, for the latter emerges only from the interaction of these opposites. In like manner, the one and the other, or being or non-being, merge in the concept of becoming, as will become presently. The crucial thing about this kind of dialectical synthesis is that opposites are not assimilating into the new notion without a trace, and they are not discarded altogether but preserved. Or rather, their strict isolation from each other is surmounted, and their actual meaning is conserved.
The artist follows this line of reasoning and adopts contradiction and opposition as the prime mover to construct his understanding of myth. This way of thinking makes it possible to combines two concepts those are myth and modernity. In this concept, the universe of myth and modernity are not rigidly isolated from each other, which would render them meaningless. And their actual meaning only arises when they are viewed in mutual contrast, thus preserved. This thinking allows him to reimagine the personalistic elements in myths and explore the methods in material executions. So, he can enclose energy into his art which is equally effective in the multiplicity of material executions.