Sanatorium is hosting Yağız Özgen’s solo exhibition titled “Painter” between September 22 – October 28, 2023. Özgen’s fifth solo show in Istanbul, the exhibition presents the artist’s practice as a performative installation, dealing with the complex relationships between objects and signs, together with the dimension of time.
In this exhibition, Özgen starts from the complex fabric of the Karaköy district, where the gallery space the show is happening is located, together with hardware and paint stores who trade in various industrial objects. The artist’s impressions and thoughts about this part of the city since 2011, especially through his observations of paint stores, appear in the exhibition as a performative installation designed according to a specific plan.
The exhibition is an arrangement that fulfills all four different functions expressed by the word “painter” in Turkish: It signifies a person who produces paint, a person who trades in paint, a person who applies paint to objects, and a shop that sells paint. The installation, which simultaneously fulfills these four functions of paint, raises important questions about the nature of the activity of painting by reflecting on the presence/absence, and nature of the difference between the activity of a painter and that of a dyer.
Özgen’s approach to art treats the object as a stage in the historical organization of the material. For this reason, in his new solo show, instead of acting like a painter, the artist aims to act like a paint manufacturer and present the material that constitutes the art object as a mandatory part and one of the conditions of the production process of the art object without disguising it as anything other than itself.
