Horasan exhibit invites viewer to walk in labyrinth

ISTANBUL – Hürriyet Daily News

Horasam focuses on the concepts of encountering, coming into terms and hanging loose as in his reproduction of Berlinde de Bruyckere's 'Marthe.'

Mustafa Horasan is presenting his solo exhibition ‘Labyrinth’ at gallery Pi Artworks. The exhibition is the result of the artist’s efforts to artistically construct the concept of labyrinth with its various meanings.

Mustafa Horasan’s latest solo exhibition at Pi Artworks Galatasaray exhibition is the result of the artist’s efforts to artistically reconstruct the concept of the labyrinth with its various meanings as seen in the works of other artists like Paul McCarthy, Berlinde de Bruyckere, Peter Coffin, The Icelandic Love Corporation and Terry Richardson. The exhibition opened on April 5 and will continue through May 19.

The works in “Labyrinth” are an extension of Horasan’s “Crash Series,” which he created in interaction with the works of many other artists that he has encountered during his career.

“In today’s environment, exactly like the audience, I find myself in a labyrinth each time I encounter a piece of art for the very first time. This is either the labyrinth of the world of the artwork or that of the artist. Within the labyrinth, what do you feel? How intense are these feelings? Where and how these feelings carry or take you? An effort to question this state of loss is the main theme forming the exhibition ‘Labyrinth,’” the artist said. The selected works are first reproduced on the computer and are worked over as oil on canvas.

The audience is introduced to the lack of security and the sense of a loss of ground, which is imposed on the viewer by the concept of the labyrinth, as all the best artworks do, through the oil on canvas work titled “Beyeler’s Backyard” which is a reinterpretation of a detail from Foundation Beyeler’s premises. In the painting the distorted outlines melting in colors eradicate the space altogether while the impressionist landscape slowly transforms into non-existence 

The artist works on themes of wonder, worry and fear in Peter Coffin’s “stairs to nowhere” work in a way that raises the tension imposed by the image, which reaches its climax when he focuses on the concepts of encountering, coming into terms and hanging loose as in Bruyckere’s “Marthe.” Recovering one’s self after a severe sense of loss becomes the key issue when Horasan works on McCarthy’s portrait, and he liberates Richardson’s Batman and Robin from their suffocation in the final piece of the show. In search of an exit through the labyrinth, what we really seek is what we really are. 

Art critic Selen Ansen, speaking about Horasan’s work, said “the constantly recurring motif of the labyrinth, stretched on the space of the work like tulle, applies the movement of the medium in the best possible way. Indeed, the recurring, paradigmatic aspect of the motif connects it to a form produced and reproduced by the technique. The motif leaves a trace on the canvas and liberates itself from the program, revealing its potential to us, engraving it on the subsequent layers of the visible, until the point in which it converges with the figure.” 

Ansen added that the works of the artist, with their vivid colors and references to the eccentricity of a consumer society overlaid by the production of the image, are reminiscent of pop-art aesthetics. “They also seem to bring the graffiti and street-art aesthetic to the space of the canvas and these aesthetics use the space of city’s backgrounds as their artistic base. In the intersection of various references and various formal spaces, the painting manages to reach its kernel by traveling over its exterior. The bright and crazy logic of the labyrinth follows the logic of the artist’s work.”

A graduate of Marmara University’s Faculty of Fine Arts, Department of Graphics (1986), Horasan has exhibited at prestigious institutions locally and internationally, including “Paristanbul” at the Grand Palais in Paris (1990), the “Turkish Artists Exhibition” in New York (1995), the “Sharjah Biennial” in the UAE (1999), “Intersecting Times” at the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art (2007), “New Horizons, New Works” at the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art (2009) and the “Istanbul Next Wave” exhibition at Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin (2009). In the spring of 2012, his works will be exhibited at the Art Dubai international art fair by Pi Artworks. He will have a solo show in Beirut in May 2012. His works are included in many local and international private and corporate collections including the Sharjah Museum. Horasan lives and works in Istanbul.