Biography by Dr. Marcus Graf

Contemporary art in Turkey is in vogue today. Its biennial is world-famous, its art fairs are sophisticated, its art market is flourishing, and the number of galleries and museums is steadily increasing. The scene, in general, is developing and professionalizing. Within this context, some curators, collectors, and artists become pop and media stars. In times of mass reproduction and mass media, art has become an issue of mass philosophy, where pop art's promise of accessibility to fame and riches is considered easily achievable for anyone brave or crazy enough to dare and try. Consequently, the society of spectacle's ideology of louder, faster, bigger, and higher, which is propelled by wild capitalism's hunger for excessive consumerism, has also shaped the way we observe and understand art. Currently, self-marketing and the development of an attractive and appealing artistic image and identity have become as important as the creation of strong work.

However, within the amusement park-like character of the globalized scene, there are artists who consciously go their own way, distant from popular trends and fashions. These artists, not oppressed by the art market and its institutions, can form consistent and exceptional works that reflect artistic personality, as well as formal and conceptual ideas of art and its context in a radically honest and authentic way. In this sense, Erkan Özdilek is an excellent example of an artist who has consistently followed his own path without falling into the traps of style, fashion, and glamor. For more than 30 years, he has created an oeuvre that, independent of popular trends, developed independent and alternative concepts as well as aesthetics.

His work, primarily shaped by painting, continually shifts between the discussion of art's intrinsic formal matters and art's contextual sociopolitical issues of the current agenda in Turkey and abroad. Therefore, Özdilek questions established formal, technical, and aesthetic topics of painting to create an individual expression that opposes current visual culture and impresses the viewer. In this way, he consistently renews the art of painting and actively contributes to its evolution. However, he is not a formalist, and his work is far from solely dealing with structural or aesthetic matters. Quite the opposite is true. Although his mainly abstract paintings contain impressive colors, textures, and contrasts, and thus have strong psycho-visual effects on the viewer, they are always expressions of ideas and concepts. On canvases and self-made paper, in a pluralistic and heterogeneous conglomerate of painting, drawing, written notes, and various materials, the artist articulates and visualizes his thoughts about reality and its many layers. In his work, the drawn line stands equal to the written word, as for Özdilek, drawing is an active engagement in life, an operation of the mind, in which the unthinkable reveals itself in a visual system. The conceptual dimension of his work is especially exposed in his site-specific installations, which he has been producing since the early 1990s. Using natural materials like silk cocoons, the idea behind the work surpasses the importance of its aesthetic.

Each piece is developed according to a concept, which is then expressed in a specific form with a particular material, and installed in a carefully chosen space in consideration of its individual location. For more than twenty years, Özdilek has created installations that demonstrate a great balance between aesthetic and conceptual issues. Often, as in his installation EcoDrawing, for example, he turns the exhibition space into a memorial, in which the viewer faces a last glimpse of nature that has already begun to evolve into a mutation of life. An artificial simulacrum that has its source in the apocalypse of modern life stands before the visitor.

In installations and in his acid paintings, Özdilek often works with materials that destruct in order to construct and create. In both his paintings and his spatially engaged work, the form is never the purpose. It serves as the carrier of emotion and thought, and is therefore never self-referential. The relationship between humans and nature plays an important role in his work. This is why Özdilek often uses natural materials, which he transposes into various sociopolitical and socioecological contexts. However, he never merely illustrates, represents, or lectures. The critical character of these works is always subversive and never didactic. Nature often functions as a metaphor, subject, and material simultaneously. As a result, in his installations, form, content, location, and context are inseparable from each other and determine the work. Additionally, for over twenty years, he has been a member of the Fine Arts Faculty at Marmara University, where he regards teaching as an integral part of his artistic work.

His students are fortunate to have him, as Özdilek is an artist who continually reinvents himself in order to develop new formal and conceptual ideas. This is why he resembles a scientist who is aware that all results he achieves in his analytical quest can only be temporary and relative. This is not a negative aspect, as it leads him to ongoing research and participation in the endless cycle of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction. In the end, Erkan Özdilek forms a poetic critique of the current status quo with his two- and three-dimensional pieces. He creates work that has a spectacular aesthetic and a radical notion of pure beauty. Simultaneously, the artist addresses the drama of our existence, in which we increasingly destroy the natural, cultural, intellectual, and spiritual foundations that make us human. In his retrospective, reviewing his career from the early 1980s to the present, viewers will have the unique opportunity to discover various facets of his work at once. They will understand that it is possible to create art that is formally and aesthetically refined without being decorative and shallow. Visitors will also see that art can be conceptually based and sociopolitically engaged without being didactic or polemical. As such, the exhibition will question the structural and conceptual character of art, and review the drama and chaos of the world we live in. It will strike a balance between form and concept, between aesthetic beauty and conceptual complexity, something that we rarely see these days.