Berke Yazıcıoğlu: Nighttime

Dirimart is thrilled to announce London-based artist Berke Yazıcıoğlu’s solo exhibition entitled Nighttime. In the exhibition presenting Yazıcıoğlu’s latest paintings and drawings, the artist’s practice, which he bases on body and objects and becomes complete by merging with the spectator’s experience, intertwines painting and illustration.

The paintings featuring undefined and ungendered bodies, which the artist depicts like a classical music composition with minimal elements, and abstract images are presented as parts of a whole in a syncopated rhythm. The forms in his paintings appearing in the dark of the night or partly obscured by darkness become unbodied objects of desire with bodies freed from the flesh at the hands of Yazıcıoğlu.

The works curated as part of Nighttime make layered references to the artist’s personal history and to the works of artists such as Andy Warhol, William Kentridge, Marlene Dumas who also engaged in painting. Receiving his BFA degree with a double major in painting and graphic design from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Yazıcıoğlu’s visual language present in his paintings has a background that bears a visible connection to his studies and inspirations at the first sight. The artist’s idiosyncratic visual language draws parallels with the aesthetic spheres created by Robert Mapplethorpe and Wolfgang Tillmans, who lived at different periods and created works focused on lenses. The language that constitutes the basis of Yazıcıoğlu’s artistic pursuits and that he makes clearly visible in his paintings enables the spectator to ask different questions as part of their own experience about the presentation of eroticism through bodies and objects, and also about the nature of the connection that the society establishes with these images. The spectator encounters bodies without identity and fragmented scenes in the exhibited works. With each subtle detail, the artist also carries out a non-verbal communication with the spectator about sexuality without gender, gender roles, body, and the relationship between the space and gender. The images and scenes in these works also represent a tense and playful stance defying the received wisdom. These paintings, which do not reveal the entire scene, are partly obscured, fragmented and up to our imagination just like some parts of our lives can only be completed by our acquired place in, and our relationships and experiences within society.

For witnessing the end result of the process in which different bodies and objects turn into objects of desire, for looking at the latent relationship that erotic images establish with society in the public sphere, you are invited to Nighttime which will be exhibited at Dirimart Pera between February 8 and March 19, 2023.

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