Özer Toraman: Garden of the Mind

Pi Artworks Istanbul is thrilled to present Ozer Toraman’s solo exhibition Garden of the Mind, from 2 December - 27 January 2023.

Özer Toraman’s latest exhibition, Garden of the Mind, invites viewers into a world where imagined landscapes blend with reality. Inspired by photographs taken in different countries around the world, Toraman’s paintings combine the imagined with the figurative, creating what the artist considers to be windows to another realm. Strolling figures and idyllic beach scenes become surreal in their isolation, while languid grassy picnics and intimate portraits become untethered to the limits of reality. The Mind Garden, therefore, represents the mental landscape where ideas and inner emotions can take root and flourish, a realm of subjective reality for the viewer to explore.

The works in this exhibition also see Toraman experiment with new compositions and objects, such as the red cape, setting this recent series apart. He opts for pastel hues as an instinctive link to his own childhood memories, with blue being particularly dominant across his works. For Toraman, blue allows him to “dream without limits,” and further positions these vignettes as windows or glimpses into a dreamscape. The artist’s signature use of flat colour planes, combined with meticulously detailed features, shuns fixed meaning and invites viewers to impart personal significance onto each scene.

Focusing on the relationship between humans and the natural world, Garden of the Mind invites us to embrace where our imagination and our consciousness overlap, the space where our creativity infiltrates our experiences of the world around us. Through his blurring of the idyllic and the real, the artist creates snapshots of a world without identity, divisions and physical limitations, one we can experience by entering these ‘windows’ and letting our imaginations run free.