Kemal Seyhan: FUTUREGARDEN

Pi Artworks Istanbul is pleased to present FUTUREGARDEN, the fourth solo exhibition at the gallery by Kemal Seyhan, one of Turkey’s most prolific contemporary painters.

Conceived as a site-specific intervention around the notion of the double, or the potential for the non-singular to appear in painting, and effect complex sculptural and architectural transformations in the experience of everyday time. In FUTUREGARDEN, Seyhan is presenting his signature black and gray paintings, based on earlier paintings from the preceding decade, oscillating between color field, abstraction and pure materiality. In the exhibition, the physical space of the gallery is transformed into a ground zero for an installation that blurs the distinction between painting, object and place.

It begins in Mariahilfe, Vienna’s 6th district, bordering the city center by the southwest: There, on the Schadekgasse, a café founded by gallerist and curator Amer Abbas, the FUTUREGARDEN, sits on number 6, the same block where he had an art gallery once. From the windows of the cafe looking onto the Esterházypark, one can take a glimpse of the infamous Flak tower, one of seven towers built at the height of the World War II, as monuments to nationalism. Atop the concrete structure, stood since 1991 an artwork by the late conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner, as a temporary installation with the inscription “Zerschmettert in Stücke (im Frieden der Nacht) / Smashed to Pieces (In the Still of the Night)”, thus re-interpreting the architectural meaning of the tower, from a symbol of nationalism to a monument against war. In this visual field we locate Kemal Seyhan, working on a number of sketches, over a decade ago, retracing the very beginning of his painterly practice, dating back to a group exhibition in 1993 at the Michaelerkirche, one of the oldest churches in the city. He began then to work on mirror-like structures and juxtapositions of pictorial surfaces as a path to enter into a dialogue with the visual history of the city. In this way, Seyhan forges his own path as a painter outside of the tradition, portraying the anxieties of a fragile present.

Since those sketches at FUTUREGARDEN in Vienna, Seyhan, living now in Istanbul, has continued to interpret the task of painting as a labor of material and time, and not a mere historical form. Yet, the preservation of Weiner’s artwork was not planned for and it was removed in 2019, in order to make space for a panoramic glass structure that would host an upscale eatery—a frequent occurrence in Vienna. In a way, the artwork became smashed to pieces, like its title. This rich context of narrative discontinuities sets the ground for Seyhan to stage an intervention on his own work for the exhibition FUTUREGARDEN: The artist removes the timestamp of colorful canvases painted in the preceding decade, covering them up in gray and black, creating a patina on the surface that would reveal the real time depth—the paintings have become excavated inside out, and only a clear emptiness remains, leaving on discrete traces of the earlier layers. The resulting paintings then become assembled with one another, in a relational framework where the gaps in between them and in the physical space, make the viewer aware that the preservation of Seyhan’s paintings was similarly unplanned for, and ultimately, only incomplete utterances remain meaningful. FUTUREGARDEN becomes a site-specific, temporary installation, returning the painting object.