Pera Museum hosts two artists’ ‘Flash-Back’

ISTANBUL- Hürriyet Daily News

Pera Museum’s exhibition of the fall season is ‘Flash-Back, Yannick Vu and Ben Jakober, Works: 1982-2012,’ an exhibition exploring thirty years of paintings and sculptures presenting vivid depictions of sensuality.

Pera Museum’s second exhibition of the fall season is “Flash-Back, Yannick Vu and Ben Jakober, Works: 1982-2012,” an exhibition exploring thirty years of paintings and sculptures presenting vivid depictions of sensuality. It includes both the individual early works of the two artists and their collaborative works that began in 1993.

“Flash-Back” is presented simultaneously with another Pera exhibition, “Golden Children, 16th - 19th Century European Portraits,” intending to allow the public to appreciate Yannick Vu and Ben Jakober as artists as well as collectors. This is because both continued practicing their art while developing their collection of children’s portraits, and after 1994 they established the foundation that bears their name. Both artists are wanderers – Jakober being of Hungarian origin born in Vienna, brought up in England and having lived in France; Vu having been born in France of a Vietnamese father and French mother. Both then chose Spain as their home to create, work and nurture their foundation.

Vu and Jakober have an intriguing space relationship between them, a space with the fruit of a spiritual, cultural, creative marriage. Jakober is an artist interested in the modernity of the materials, and the ways in which he can make this modernity seem archaic. Vu, on the other hand, is not preoccupied by this quality of modernity, but by the expressive, spiritual quality of her images.

Between Jakober and Vu there is another marriage between sculpture and painting, between western technological euphoria and equilibrium, indifference towards the materials, and a need for art always to be like a reservoir in which ideas lie and ferment, where they revert into themselves to create a concept, an idea, a reading of the world. The two artists from separate, different backgrounds converge in a common space in which the work of art merges into a unique form.

In the written statement released through Pera Museum, Vu and Jakober said: “We are proud to present this overview of our work at the Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation, Pera Museum. Though we have exhibited our works together in the past at a number of museums and galleries … our early works have not been shown together since an exhibition at the Brandstatter Gallery, Vienna in 1983 and later on at the Wurthle Gallery, 1989, also in Vienna. But even these exhibitions did not include Vu’s self-portraits.”

“Flash-Back, Yannick Vu and Ben Jakober, Works: 1982-2012” will be on view until Jan. 6, 2013 at the Pera Museum, in the Beyoğlu district of Istanbul.

Pera’s Education
Meanwhile, also for its autumn season, Pera Education is offering two different educational programs to Jan. 6, 2013, also in conjunction with the exhibitions “Golden Children 16th-19th Century European Portraits,” and “Flash-Back, Works of Yannick Vu and Ben Jakober: 1982-2012.”

Running until Dec. 23 for children aged 4 to 14, the educational programs “Golden Children” and “Art for Two” will offer children the opportunity to closely study the dazzling collection from the Yannick and Ben Jakober Portraits Collection, which focuses on royal children portraits from the 16th to 19th centuries, as well as the Vu and Jakober exhibition.

After being taught about the classical children’s portraits and contemporary artworks, the participating children will be able to use their own creativity and the insights.

The participating children will have the opportunity to develop various projects, using different materials and techniques under the guidance of artist and instructor Leyla Sakpınar. The workshops will take place on weekends until Dec. 23, details can be found on the Pera Museum website: http://www.peramuzesi.org.tr/