Gülgün Başarır Paintings at Milli Reasürans Art Gallery

* Gülgün Başarır, who prepared her exhibition by working for two years in the spaces and gardens of Topkapı Palace, transforms the human reality hidden in the silence of the past into a contemporary mythology.

* These are paintings that startle people with their silence, worry with their loneliness, turn inward with their simplicity, and sadden with their weariness, and open the doors for people to question their own holistic adventure from a reality in detail.

Gülgün Başarır attracted attention and was watched with interest with the exhibition she opened at Milli Reasürans Art Gallery in 1999. After two years of preparation, the artist once again presents her works to viewers with the same pictorial perspective and her completely personalized technique and colors.

The artist, who explains her pictorial perspective and the creative drive behind her paintings as “The reality that I feel the pain of inside me and experience in a different way every day interests me,” had turned to current realities in her previous exhibition. She had transferred a detail she had seen from her window, doorway, corridor or stairwell to her canvas. Extremely real details from a frozen world where gray colors predominate, there is no light or it can only enter by filtering are the characteristics seen in the artist’s paintings. All of them carry traces of people but are places without people, as if they had just been abandoned. These were not scary but strange paintings. The red dashed lines on the canvases were further widening the gap between the viewer and the painting. The artist had depicted the reality that “pained her” in an ordinary reality in the detail. The viewer was looking for himself in these pictures without people or was opening up towards his own human adventure.

In her new exhibition, Gülgün Başarır turned from the current world to past worlds, palaces and gardens. She worked with the same pictorial perspective and the same concerns. It was as if this time, she was looking for the fragmented reality of humanity in the magnificent places of the past, far from the current world.

Gülgün Başarır worked in Topkapı Palace and its gardens for months while preparing for the exhibition. He drew patterns full of details reflected from the palace’s corridors, domes, windows, stairs, a gilded door border, wall or ceiling ornaments, and a hall mirror. The artist, who works very close to reality in his pattern works, recreates reality with his own perspective when he starts working on canvas. He worked in the palace garden, but what is reflected on the canvases is not a magnificent palace garden view. The trunks of centuries-old plane trees bearing the traces of centuries. The artist consciously worked hard and strained to make the trunks look real. From this point on, that tree ceased to be a plane tree trunk in the palace garden and became a tree the artist wanted to see or its reality. The spaces are again uninhabited, motionless, and silent. Again, shades of gray dominate the canvases. A dirty brown has found its place on the doors. Like the previous ones, these are paintings that startle people with their silence, worry people with their loneliness, turn people inward with their simplicity, make them sad with their worn-outness, and open the doors to people questioning their own holistic adventure from a reality in detail... There are red lines again, but this time not inside the painting, but on its surface. They enter the painting from the outside. Dragging the viewer along. They transform the human reality hidden in the silence of the past into a contemporary mythology once again.