Berlin gallery hosts Ahmet Güneştekin’s ‘Sun Road’

ISTANBUL

Galerie Michael Schultz in Berlin is hosting an exhibition by Turkish artist Ahmet Güneştekin.

Titled “Sun Road,” the exhibition manifests Güneştekin’s talent in a variety of mediums, from optic and dimensional paintings and patchwork quilts to his most recent forays in sculpture. It shows the way he imagines ancient elements of mythologies and religions in an acutely intricate and bright context. 

Combining mixed media items like concave mirrors and metal cages with optical illusions and color gradients, Güneştekin forges a unique space steeped in mythologies that have prevailed for centuries. 

His uses of symbolism influenced by ancient mythologies and religions and his treatment of iconography of objects make his art simultaneously ancient and modern. From his interventions into patchwork quilts to his hybrid use of metal and mirrors in wall reliefs and optic paintings, “Sun Road” focuses on different chapters of his artistic career. 

The curator of the exhibition, Christoph Tannert, says Güneştekin is “able to enclose energy into his art.” 
“This is equally effective in the multiplicity of material executions. It shows itself before it is intelligibly comprehended. Its direction of action is consciously designed, although Güneştekin shows no inclination to address clear content to the audience. Instead, he seems to be interested in what is left unsaid. The basis for this is his particularly pictorial-artistic statement, with which he conveys the peculiarities as well as myths and modernity of his culture,” Tannert said.

Güneştekin’s sense of light and color radiates throughout his objects and it is probably what strikes the eye at first, sometimes making it challenging for the uninitiated to move beyond this luminosity to see the various levels of drawing, figuration, and abstraction that inhabit his objects. There is a density to his imagery that requires frequent re-engagement.

Güneştekin does not only superimpose his patterns and themes into the traditionally sewed quilts, he also intervenes in an extent to reveal the presence of his quality constructing his own voice. They are quilts whose motifs are not very realistic but full of symbolism. The fullness of creative potential, for the artist, lies in breaking loose from geometry, in free variations of colors, forms, materials and creative techniques. Only along this path could the patchwork quilt become the mirror of the present time that provided its inspiration. 
In “Sun Road,” Güneştekin informs the viewer of the convergence of the modern and the traditional and suggests a dialogue between the unchanging and the new. 

The exhibition, which opened on April 29, will be open to visit through May 20.