THE BEGINNING OF NARRATIVE
Nadide Akdeniz has continued her artistic career in an uninterrupted manner since the early 1970s, and perhaps the most appropriate definition of her is “the green sorcerer of the great green world”1. Nadide Akdeniz constructs fairy-tale-like green landscapes that cross and intersect social, cultural, ecological, political and spiritual worlds. The artist acts as a selective narrator in her artistic practice and concerns herself with opening a path of differentiation in “untrodden regions”. Her path begins in her early paintings where she transmits her observations of everyday life with a social realist and naïve sensibility. These scenes, where she reflects urban life, migration from the countryside to the city, gecekondu neighbourhoods, or shanty towns, the everyday life of disadvantaged classes and relationships between women and men each become a landscape of reality. From the 1980s on, Akdeniz embraces fantasy along a path that she expands by never completely letting go of her pursuit of reality. Her paintings display a refined sensibility, and provide an alternative to the popular tendencies of her period. The organic universe of the artist that begins to live and move with plants, trees, leaves, ivy, fruit and flowers completely fills the surface of the canvas, forming the flora that becomes the style, now synonymous with the artist. Her dreamlike landscapes become, in a sense, her magical, green pseudonym.
In Nadide Akdeniz’s fantastic-realistic world, objects that appear as indicators of an ordinary life become symbols indicating society/humanity/time. The fictive, psychological and socio-cultural suggestions of a white cloth, a teapot, a kettle, a hat, a chair, a shoe, a mannequin or an oxygen cylinder take their place in her paintings as loaded metaphors. The cultural baggage of identity, life’s feminine cycle, womanhood, eroticism and sexuality reveal themselves within a feminine symbolism that displays no timidity. Akdeniz, in her works produced after the 1990s, interblends objects, forms and situations. The artist’s paintings reflect, in a grotesque and ironic style, all motifs and images that seem impossible to bring together, presenting the viewer with an emancipating experience of infinite expression between humanity and nature, society and culture and dream and reality.
There is a metaphysical dimension, created with images, symbols and metaphors in Nadide Akdeniz’s works. Therefore, it would be more appropriate to approach her artistic practice via a comprehensive theme and non-temporal perspective rather than reading her works through a chronological and linear perception of time.
Nadide Akdeniz has continued her artistic career in an uninterrupted manner since the early 1970s, and perhaps the most appropriate definition of her is “the green sorcerer of the great green world”1. Nadide Akdeniz constructs fairy-tale-like green landscapes that cross and intersect social, cultural, ecological, political and spiritual worlds. The artist acts as a selective narrator in her artistic practice and concerns herself with opening a path of differentiation in “untrodden regions”. Her path begins in her early paintings where she transmits her observations of everyday life with a social realist and naïve sensibility. These scenes, where she reflects urban life, migration from the countryside to the city, gecekondu neighbourhoods, or shanty towns, the everyday life of disadvantaged classes and relationships between women and men each become a landscape of reality. From the 1980s on, Akdeniz embraces fantasy along a path that she expands by never completely letting go of her pursuit of reality. Her paintings display a refined sensibility, and provide an alternative to the popular tendencies of her period. The organic universe of the artist that begins to live and move with plants, trees, leaves, ivy, fruit and flowers completely fills the surface of the canvas, forming the flora that becomes the style, now synonymous with the artist. Her dreamlike landscapes become, in a sense, her magical, green pseudonym.
In Nadide Akdeniz’s fantastic-realistic world, objects that appear as indicators of an ordinary life become symbols indicating society/humanity/time. The fictive, psychological and socio-cultural suggestions of a white cloth, a teapot, a kettle, a hat, a chair, a shoe, a mannequin or an oxygen cylinder take their place in her paintings as loaded metaphors. The cultural baggage of identity, life’s feminine cycle, womanhood, eroticism and sexuality reveal themselves within a feminine symbolism that displays no timidity. Akdeniz, in her works produced after the 1990s, interblends objects, forms and situations. The artist’s paintings reflect, in a grotesque and ironic style, all motifs and images that seem impossible to bring together, presenting the viewer with an emancipating experience of infinite expression between humanity and nature, society and culture and dream and reality.
There is a metaphysical dimension, created with images, symbols and metaphors in Nadide Akdeniz’s works. Therefore, it would be more appropriate to approach her artistic practice via a comprehensive theme and non-temporal perspective rather than reading her works through a chronological and linear perception of time.