18 December 2021 – 18 March 2022
Sand Flower
Dubai, UAE
AWC Dubai
A Lifetime in a Day
2021
Oil on Canvas
100 x 100 cm
Waking up to a New Era
2021
Oil on Canvas
100 x 100 cm
Gelene-ek 11
2021
Mixed Media
70 x 122 x 35 cm
Driver’s Memory
2021
Ceramic
23 x 30 cm
Gelene-ek 16
2021
Mixed Media
100 x 155 x 35 cm
Gelene-ek 13
2021
Mixed Media
75 x 120 x 40 cm
I Love Dubai
2021
Mixed Media
150 x 150 x 30 cm
Secret in the Cage
2021
Mixed Media
130 x 300 x 20 cm
Journey to Mount Kaf
2020
Oil on Canvas
190 x 300 cm
50th Year of The United Arab Emirates
2021
Mixed Media
150 Ø x 30 cm
50th Year of The United Arab Emirates
2021
Mixed Media
180 Ø x 30 cm
Gelene-ek 21
2021
Mixed Media
90 x 163 x 42 cm
The exhibition’s title comes from the desert rose, a complex formation of sand grains and crystal clusters. This fragile geological flower embodies an organic system, a self-organizing idea of the natural world, and is the structural principle for the artist’s thinking. Its floral formation, colour components, organic and fractal qualities, and the patterns in the topography of the desert where it blooms overlap with the forms embraced by the artist.
Many patterns in nature are so irregular and fragmented. The existence of these patterns challenges the artist to study those forms. He conceives and produces his version of the natural world, his geometry of nature. His practice emerges in the patterns he employs, where he merges the spiral structures with mythological components.
“Sand Flower” includes works that manifest the artist’s notion of this fragmented world. They unearth his vision that there is a fractal face to the geometry of nature. Among the exhibited are the bronze sculptures with vibrant patterns and structures that appear over his metamorphosed animals and whose traces are in the mythical cosmos. Paintings that speak about the powerful mythic motifs in human life, the pattern of ending and renewal, as he does, inviting the viewer to witness the emergence of an exquisite butterfly. And his works focus on the question of life and death.
The spiral structure, recurring patterns, and geometric iterations in Güneştekin’s works reveal natural compositions such as floral structural rings and rippled sand waves. The flares begin on the surface with a central origin, and the other rows expand outward from there. He uses a series of fragmented and collateral/abreast cells. Each cell’s field corresponds to an interpretation and colour, often intertwining. He constructs this field of interpretation, covering it with a mythological shell as a formative element of the semantic structure.