SANATORIUM will host Kemal Özen’s exhibition “Artifical Hells” between September 10 – October 14, 2017.
The exhibition will also be the opening exhibition of SANATORIUM’s new space, where the artist will meet the audience with his oil and acrylic paintings on canvas together with his charcoal drawings as well as new media and trials such as sculpture and installation that have not appeared in his previous exhibitions.
The artist states the following about the exhibition: “The images distributed on canvas, paper or workspace as if in a mood of dancing in clubs with remixes of melancholic songs in our daily life that has become a parody can only represent a few pieces of loads that include fun, melancholy, violence, love, memories and are accumulated in our throat. The renunciation of this world, the by-passing of boundaries between life and death, the gradually disappearing hope that is embodied in the future, the brain's effort to reflexively hold on to life, and on the other hand, today's human being interwoven with the’urge of death’ as the soul's rebellion to this; all of these I engrave onto the surface again by passing them through a dark filter.” In his works, Özen attempts to render visible on the surface all together the artificial hells created by the civilization. In the exhibition, through the media he uses, the artist tries to reflect the events he witnesses, reads and hears about, the tragedies intertwined with the dark events taking place in the social layers of the geography he lives in, and the answers to the fact that one makes this world a hard place to live. He looks for answers regarding how we protect and position ourselves in this world that we are not able to internalize and that we turned into a hell where we are trying to exist as individuals, and he shares the answers with his audience through the works in the exhibition.
“On our planet, where absolute happiness has never existed, I try to remind ourselves of ourselves once again through painting by means of blending tragicomic situations with the horrible events that we have normalized.” Kemal Özen
About the artist:
Born in 1984 in Samsun, Özen graduated from the Samsun Ondokuz Mayıs University Fine Arts Faculty Painting Department and took his master’s degree from the Fine Arts Education Department at the same university. Besides his solos exhibitions “Cold Meal” at GALERIST in 2010 and “Be a Good Boy, Blossom with Your Pain” at SANATORIUM in 2013, he took part in the following group exhibitions: “Where Fire Has Struck”, Depo, 2014; “Sublime”, SANATORIUM, 2014; “Nerdeen Nereye”, Blok Art Space, 2015; “Transparency of Evil or Looking to the Other”, Kare Sanat, 2015; “Indie-Line”, ArtSümer, 2016; “Contemporary Art Project Competition For Youth Exhibition”, CerModern, 2016. He participated in Contemporary Istanbul and ArtParis fairs as SANATORIUM’s artist.
The exhibition will also be the opening exhibition of SANATORIUM’s new space, where the artist will meet the audience with his oil and acrylic paintings on canvas together with his charcoal drawings as well as new media and trials such as sculpture and installation that have not appeared in his previous exhibitions.
The artist states the following about the exhibition: “The images distributed on canvas, paper or workspace as if in a mood of dancing in clubs with remixes of melancholic songs in our daily life that has become a parody can only represent a few pieces of loads that include fun, melancholy, violence, love, memories and are accumulated in our throat. The renunciation of this world, the by-passing of boundaries between life and death, the gradually disappearing hope that is embodied in the future, the brain's effort to reflexively hold on to life, and on the other hand, today's human being interwoven with the’urge of death’ as the soul's rebellion to this; all of these I engrave onto the surface again by passing them through a dark filter.” In his works, Özen attempts to render visible on the surface all together the artificial hells created by the civilization. In the exhibition, through the media he uses, the artist tries to reflect the events he witnesses, reads and hears about, the tragedies intertwined with the dark events taking place in the social layers of the geography he lives in, and the answers to the fact that one makes this world a hard place to live. He looks for answers regarding how we protect and position ourselves in this world that we are not able to internalize and that we turned into a hell where we are trying to exist as individuals, and he shares the answers with his audience through the works in the exhibition.
“On our planet, where absolute happiness has never existed, I try to remind ourselves of ourselves once again through painting by means of blending tragicomic situations with the horrible events that we have normalized.” Kemal Özen
About the artist:
Born in 1984 in Samsun, Özen graduated from the Samsun Ondokuz Mayıs University Fine Arts Faculty Painting Department and took his master’s degree from the Fine Arts Education Department at the same university. Besides his solos exhibitions “Cold Meal” at GALERIST in 2010 and “Be a Good Boy, Blossom with Your Pain” at SANATORIUM in 2013, he took part in the following group exhibitions: “Where Fire Has Struck”, Depo, 2014; “Sublime”, SANATORIUM, 2014; “Nerdeen Nereye”, Blok Art Space, 2015; “Transparency of Evil or Looking to the Other”, Kare Sanat, 2015; “Indie-Line”, ArtSümer, 2016; “Contemporary Art Project Competition For Youth Exhibition”, CerModern, 2016. He participated in Contemporary Istanbul and ArtParis fairs as SANATORIUM’s artist.