Seçkin Pirim: Retreat

Dirimart is thrilled to present Seçkin Pirim’s first solo exhibition at the gallery titled Retreat. The exhibition brings together the artist’s post-pandemic sculptures and paper works shaped around the idea of the introversion and the difficulties of adapting to a calm life.

The spontaneous forms in Seçkin Pirim’s works produced in neo-minimalist style through numerous different materials represent the artist’s social connections and his journey to re-meet himself and become his own self. Drawing his inspiration and production style from Rumi’s conception

of “from one to whole,” the issues and experiences that Pirim occupies himself with as the source of his art constitute the representation of spiritual-physical purification and introspection in his latest works. Pirim is seeking answers to questions of renewal and transformation through repeating forms that force their own limits in the face of present-day chaotic and heterogenous modes of existence.

The economic, geographical, and sociocultural pains that the entire world is grappling with have led humanity to look for methods of protecting mental health to cope with negative feelings such as anger, fear, sorrow, and anxiety. Retreat seems like an ideal way to deal with the mental problems one encounters while trying to overcome the worldly pessimism and fears that one experiences. In the exhibition, Seçkin Pirim conveys this concept, which dates back thousands of years and can be summarized as a method of distancing oneself from the society, by creating an environment that points at the customs of retreat. Here retreat turns into an incorporeal invitation that the visitor can personally experience through the works on display and the spatial arrangement of the exhibition venue.

Through its cave-like texture and lighting, the installation titled Cave at the entrance of the exhibition insulates the viewers from the outside world, providing them with a calm and tranquil moment, a space for introspection. Meanwhile the paper works Me and Me Inside and You and You Inside in the exhibition space that evoke flags appear before us as a symbol of the collective ritual pointing at the twin theme of loneliness/togetherness that one encounters in religious spaces. Welcoming the visitors to the venue, Niche placed on the front wall of the semicircular apse common in ancient basilicas, and the paper works Each of the Four Nights composed of innumerable layers, placed on the back wall of the apsis, emerge as the materialized forms of changing emotional states. The sinuous forms seen on the installation titled A Plan for an Inexistent Future placed in the middle of the apse, which emerges after the people, emotions, places, and objects that leave traces in the human life and bears witness to the sense of retreat, are the projections of the spaces that have affected Pirim in his travels and created in him the desire to be a recluse.

Meanwhile, Sanctuary built in the form of an altar comes across as the representation of attaining nirvana. Positioned in the venue as a point of purification, the sculpture is a sanctuary that recalls the need for purification from all kinds of feelings as a representative process of rebirth. Pirim’s installation of forty small-size paper works titled Retreat alludes to the forty days when Rumi retreated to a private space and devoted himself to prayer. With this unity of works, Pirim seems to be looking for a way out of the emotional deformation of the individual caused by the presently rampant state of exposing personal information.

Seçkin Pirim (b. 1977, Ankara). He associates his life with his sculptures which are composed of repeating forms. The artist has received more than 20 awards in sculpture and design and exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions at local and international art institutions and galleries including Borusan Sanat, Pera Museum, Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Glory Yeh Museum & Sculpture Park, Yverdon-les-Bains, and Saatchi Gallery. His works are featured in collections such as The National Art Museum of China, Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, Odunpazarı Modern Museum, Baksı Museum and Elgiz Museum. Pirim lives and works in Istanbul and London.