The nude: A roadmap to looking at someone else’s body

The Millî Reasürans Art Gallery will be hosting a selection exhibition of paintings on the subject of "The Nude" in Turkish painting between March 2-27, 2004.

The exhibition aims to make visible all possible states of the body as the only space belonging to the human being, through the idea of the use of the naked body in painting.

The exhibition is accompanied by excerpts from the texts of writers and thinkers who developed ideas about nudity in the 20th century.

The exhibition, which is the product of a process of approximately one year, is being curated by Levent Çalıkoğlu.

The Millî Reasürans Art Gallery is organizing a selection exhibition on the use of the naked body in Turkish painting. The exhibition, which consists of paintings with nude content produced approximately after 1945, aims to make the viewer feel the concepts that may lead to the use of the naked body in painting.

Levent Çalıkoğlu, who organized the exhibition, defines the use of the nude in painting as the roadmap for looking at someone else's body. According to Çalıkoğlu, when the word nude is mentioned, the first thing that comes to mind is the nude as a category of artistic representation. However, there may be different reasons for using a naked body. The curator lists these possibilities as follows: “Whether it has emerged from a live model or from the imagination of its producer revealing erotic desires, every nude transferred to space can encompass all possible states of the body as the only space belonging to the human being: It shows what is behind the clothes, it is the target of isolation and torture, it provides the pleasure of watching-peeping, it takes on the description of the other sex, it becomes a metaphor for beauty, it hides or shouts the expression of sexual signs, it makes the softness of the desired skin felt, it ceremonializes seduction, it corresponds to the longing felt for the body of the lover, it turns into a shell that envelops the soul...”

Therefore, no matter what aesthetic and subjective reasons it is made for and no matter what social and personal gender hierarchy it contributes to the reinforcement of, the state of being naked provokes two fundamental questions: “Why is this body naked?” and “Who is looking at it?”

The exhibition is composed of works with different contents that seek answers to these two questions.

The exhibition titled “Naked” was also transformed into a unique arrangement. The works selected for the exhibition are accompanied by texts by writers and thinkers who tried to provide descriptions of the use of the body, nudity, the body and eroticism in the 20th century. Çalıkoğlu says the following about the exhibition’s arrangement: “The selected paintings were associated without being grouped in a way that might show similarities, and sometimes they were allowed to speak freely on their own. The text that would wander around the exhibition space was left to its own independent flow, not as a guide but rather as a sign that would stagger and break the image, and was stacked when necessary, and turned into a meaningful weave that was added end to end. However, neither the text nor the image were allowed to surround each other or create sharp and distinct references. Therefore, both the signifieds should be read as a naked indicator and the concepts should be left to the connotations of the imagination. Although the works clearly deal with the naked body, it should not be forgotten that nudity is related to the imagination.

The exhibition, which can be seen between March 2-27, 2004, is attended by Fikret Mualla, Naile Akıncı, Nuri İyem, Saip Tuna, İhsan Cemal Karaburçak, Hakkı Anlı, Avni Arbaş, Nejat Devrim, Nedim Günsur, Yüksel Arslan, Hamit Görele, Bedri Rahmi Eyüpoğlu, Leyla Gamsız, İlhan Berk, Altan Adalı, Erol Akyavaş, Burhan Uygur, İsmail Türemen, Ömer Uluç, Ergin İnan, Cihat Aral, Nevhiz, Zehra Aral, Fatma Tülin, Bedri Baykam, Mustafa Horasan, Temür Köran, Taner Ceylan, and Selahattin Yıldırım.