Ali Artun: Giacometti’s cul-de-sac of reality

Conference

April 4, 2015 / 14:30

Giacometti has always tried to see and capture reality. But he can’t. In his quest for reality, he chips away at his early sculptures, reducing them to nothingness. He eventually begins to work with “surreal” objects and revolutionizes the field. Shortly thereafter, however, he returns to the age-old problematic of aesthetics and attempts to discover the interaction between art and reality. He gets stuck with endless copies. He fails to complete his brother’s portrait and bust for five years, even though he works on them every day. He admits he “can’t even finish a head.” In the end, however, he creates an aesthetics, a philosophy out of this cul-de-sac of reality that imprisoned him. He inspires the existentialists as much as he does the surrealists.

Free of admissions. Conference language is Turkish.
Limited space, drop in.

Ali Artun graduated from METU Department of Architecture. He is the founder and member of numerous associations in art and architecture. He took part in the establishment of Gallery Nev in 1984. Since then, he has organized numerous exhibitions for Gallery Nev in Ankara as well as other exhibitions in Ankara and Istanbul. He edited over a hundred titles published by Gallery Nev. Since 2002, he directs the “Art-Life” series that brings together works in cultural criticism, and teaches in the Graduate Program of Art History at ITU.

Temporary Exhibition

Alberto Giacometti

Pera Museum proudly announced the first major exhibition of sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti in Turkey taking a retrospective approach. Organized in collaboration with the Giacometti Foundation, Paris, this exhibition explored Giacometti’s prolific life, most of which the artist led in his studio in Montparnasse, through the works of his early period as well his late work, including one unfinished piece.

Alberto Giacometti

Dancing on Architecture

Dancing on Architecture

I think it was Frank Zappa – though others claim it was Laurie Anderson – who said in an interview that ‘writing on music is much like dancing on architecture’. 

Return from Vienna

Return from Vienna

Józef Brandt harboured a fascination for the history of 17th century Poland, and his favourite themes included ballistic scenes and genre scenes before and after the battle proper –all and sundry marches, returns, supply trains, billets and encampments, patrols, and similar motifs illustrating the drudgery of warfare outside of its culminating moments.

Midnight Horror Stories: <br> Witches’ Sun <br> Mehmet Berk Yaltırık

Midnight Horror Stories:
Witches’ Sun
Mehmet Berk Yaltırık

I walk over rocks hot as iron under the September sun. I can make out a few lines in the distance, and a few cracked rocks, but apart from those, not a single tree, not one plant