Derya Yücel

İstanbul, February 2014

Formed out of daily life, daily objects, daily subjects and daily values; Pop-art has been the visual reflection of mass culture and consumption insanity expressed by the shallow technics of communication mediums. Artists gave a new meaning to any object or good, while consuming the aimed one. At this point, daily reality gained an authentic halo on the phenomenonal side. Today, our sense of reality had changed radically. If the experience of reality outcomes as a paradoxal result of aesthetic transformation, that means it appropriated by the artists as well. Pop-art's claim of rendering the ordinary into new horizons still flows through today, reality is recreated implicitly and originated strictly like it is seen for the first time.

A. Danto, states that he embraces a modern-art-history narration which Pop philosophically contributes in center. In this ostentatious text, “Pop, shifting the art's philosophical fact into self-conscious, marks end of the big narrative of Western Art.” Pop-art, defined as the most unforeseen delegate of philosophical sophistication, laboured to reconnect the art with life and reality, and became the initial point of the new direction appeared in visual arts after 1960. Briefly, pop, more than being just a movement, is a tremendous rise, points out to social, cultural and artistic evolutions. Pop, is a gesture, not a celebration of banal, but an exploration the meaning behind the banal. This is one of the reasons that this connection is still alive today. Still, artists include the ordinary in their work, even run away from it  and also accept it. But, they deal with it not in a way casually or happenstance, but with the reference of uncanny and absurd.

İstanbul Art Space, opens up its first exhibition UNIQUE COLOURS  curated by Derya Yücel at The Marmara Pera Hotel.  Founded in December 2013 with the vision of building a well rounded, project-based structure , Istanbul Art Space aims to provide a space to artists from different disciplines to interact, to support artists and art projects to be exhibited on a new platform.

The artists gather for the exhibition titled UNIQUE COLOURS; Ardan Özmenoğlu, Arzu Akgün, Kezban Arca Batıbeki, Murat Salcı, Turan Büyükkahraman and Yusuf Aygeç, use pop-art strategies to screen emptiness and homogeneity dealing with popular images, daily life icons, ordinary objects and social patterns. Popular graphic imagination, also observed in the works of the exhibiton, opens up a new horizon which truth can be represented by gestures. Artists transfer the well-knowns and familiars into art by metamorphosing. Mystify the objects and icons of common cultural experience in a way completely different from itself or the others; or common images like a yarn brand, a nostalgic mag, a moment of shopping, ad/pop star or an ordinary mural painting pulled out of its  current moment in time/history. Produced in unique colours or forms, artists use their individual methods with the motivation of pop-art.

Managing pop-art strategies by artists generates mesmerizing results mostly on the point of cultural-artistic and social journals' interface. Formulated to genuine, tune to critique, evasion to challenge, simple to original, expression to metaphor;  works in the exhibition example art's neutral category or unfixable style frankly.