EXHIBITIONS / PAST / SEDEF HATAPKAPULU

INSTALLATION

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Title: Sedef Hatapkapulu's Art Exhibition at Millî Reasürans Art Gallery

Millî Reasürans Art Gallery surprises art circles by introducing the artist Sedef Hatapkapulu, who spent 15 years of her art career in Vienna and Moscow, returned to Istanbul in 2002, and is not widely known outside a limited circle in Turkey.

Sedef Hatapkapulu received her painting education from Neşe Erdok and Adnan Çoker at M.S.G.S.Ü Painting Department (1983-1986). She then pursued academic education at the Vienna Applied Fine Arts Academy Painting Department in Austria, where she lived for 15 years, earning her master's degree (1987-1994).

Hatapkapulu compares painting to living; she describes it as, "Firstly, what I see, traces that exist for a moment on the surface of the water and then disappear. Like the marks that emerge one after the other on the water's surface when the wings of a bird very close to the sea touch the water, immediately erased. However, they do not disappear; they sink to the bottom of the water. I'm not curious about the bottom of the water; not because I'm afraid of being hit. While thinking, I am not thinking with words. When drawing with color, stain, ink, I go, it says turn, I turn, it says close, I close, it says yellow, I say yellow, it says pink, I say pink. It can emerge in an unknown place. I do not know what I do not know; if I am pleased to meet, they stay."

When revealing the traces deep within during the challenging adventure towards the depths of the water, she also sees it as a journey into the "unknown." The sediments of the traces in the depths emerge as a painting in the language she knows best, according to the artist, they are "one hundred percent real."

Hatapkapulu defines the surface traces as marks that appear for a moment, transferred to paper briefly but intensively until the ink dries. However, at the canvas, especially in large canvases, you cannot be as "fast as ink" when revealing what is in the depths. While the painting is on a path, "you forget what to do halfway," the painting takes another path. When painting an area, you distance yourself from yourself at that moment, as if another "you" is attributing another color to your painting. Eventually, at some point, the painting "ends." Then, it "meets" with the painting in front of it, if pleased, the "picture" becomes a painting.

In this process of extreme intensification, the artist states that the images of the paper where the traces are recorded and the canvas where all the "sediments" take shape are "different in appearance but have the same content"; "The traces on the water's surface are actually the same as the traces in the deepest. What a person experiences first, after a long journey, is where they actually reach. Or what is one hundred percent real, the first trace when the stone touched the water at the moment it reached the surface is the same. In other words, the first moment when it touches the real water and the moment it sits at the bottom are the same, it never changes." Each painting is like meeting another "self" within her.

While studying in Austria, she participated in group exhibitions in Vienna, Brixen (Italy), and Istanbul. The artist held her first solo exhibition in Vienna in 1997 after completing her education. Later, she organized exhibitions in Moscow (1999) and Istanbul (2002, 2003, 2005).

The exhibition at Millî Reasürans is the artist's first comprehensive solo exhibition. This unique and "young, new, and enthusiastic" artist, who will undoubtedly be talked about a lot in the future for Turkey, can be viewed from March 6 to March 31, 2007.

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