NURİ KUZUCAN. PASAJ / PASSAGE

01.06.2023 - 31.12.2023
ARTER, ISTANBUL

NURİ KUZUCAN
PASAJ
PASSAGE

CURATOR:
NİLÜFER ŞAŞMAZER

Galerist is proud to announce that Nuri Kuzucan’s solo exhibition titled Passage is currently on view at Arter, Istanbul. The exhibition brings together a selection of the artist’s earlier works and new productions within a site-specific architectural setting. The exhibition centres on both cognitive and perceptual fluidity and transitivity by featuring works that revolve around dualities such as chaos/order, light/shadow, emptiness/fullness, surface/depth, and interior/exterior. Taking place on Arter’s 1st-floor gallery, Passage creates associations between the transitional space the exhibition resides in and the pictorial space through the architectural, literary, and metaphorical connotations of the word ‘passage’.

Passage invites visitors to explore the paintings and the space from multiple standpoints by referring to their past experiences and activating their imaginations; rather than works that guarantee a fixed and singular experience, it offers a myriad of images that keep reinventing themselves while aiming for each work to interact with the space and highlight one another, instead of merely being viewed from the static locations where they are hang. Thus, the exhibition reimagines the whole space as a pictorial composition and facilitates a distinctive experience of a ‘painting-space’ or ‘spatial painting’ in which visitors can navigate. The intricately woven spatial design and the lighting delicately tuned to suit it also contribute to this experience by heralding new ways of looking and seeing.

In his artistic practice spanning more than twenty years, space has always been a focal point for Kuzucan whose initial works featured multi-coloured interiors, evolving to depictions of streets and urban landscapes, to bird’s-eye renderings of the city, and finally, monochrome architectural structures that fragment into abstraction. The artist’s most recent paintings integrate fundamental architectural elements with primal geometrical forms and offer a wealth of abstract associations as studies of space and open works.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
In his paintings Nuri Kuzucan explores intimate spaces and urban landscapes. He is concerned with how the modern city affects the dweller and unravels the solitude through abstract forms that resemble masses of concrete. Depicting imaginary spaces, Kuzucan makes his paintings by layering paint, starting with an arangement of small geometric pieces that end up creating a discernible whole. The artist expresses his reaction to modernism also in his choice of material: the paper tape he uses consolidates the impact he seeks to create upon the viewer. Kuzucan’s works have a fundamental context: to imagine a three-dimensional space within two-dimensional space, and he excels in doing this through his personal power of observation and a contemporary reflection on the culture of seeing.