CONTEMPORARY ISTANBUL 2023

Marion Fink

Cal Lane

Fırat Neziroğlu

Irfan Önürmen

Micha Serraf

Roxa Smith

​

September 26 - October 1, 2023

VIP Preview: September 26 - 27

General Admission: September 28 - October 1 

​

​

C24 Gallery is pleased to announce our participation in the 18th edition of Contemporary Istanbul, which will be held over four days from 28 September - 1 October, 2023, with preview days on the 26th and 27th. Exhibiting artists will include İrfan Önürmen, Marion Fink, Fırat Neziroğlu, Cal Lane, Micha Serraf, and Roxa Smith. You can find us in Booth T7-23.

​

İrfan Önürmen’s work reveals the relationships and discrepancies between personal and public experience as seen through the lens of contemporary media. The artist addresses the impact of mass media on human experience and its visual representation through collage, painting, and sculpture. With a unique aesthetic approach of layering tulle and textile materials, Önürmen creates a mysterious tone in each work that explores the concepts of vulnerability, transparency, fragmentation and depth, in the pursuit of harmony and dissonance.

​

Potsdam and Berlin-based artist Marion Fink is known for her life-sized, colorful monotypes depicting young people in various states of connection and disconnection to the elements of the world around them. As part of a generation that was raised in the digital age, she has experienced, firsthand, the paradox of seemingly limitless access to information along with increasingly fragmented, competing perspectives, exacerbated by the harsh scrutiny of social media. The resulting feelings of isolation and dissociation from genuine, physical interactions form the foundation for Fink’s surreal portraits of young people, each living in their own parallel reality. In her newest body of work, Fink sharpens her lens to explore the moments just before and during major life transitions coming out from a state of inertia.

​

The art of Fırat Neziroğlu stands unique, in its own genre in the world of contemporary art. His weavings require a rigorous, disciplined devotion to technique and execution, paying ttribute to traditional weaving while redefining this medium in contemporary art. A main feature of Neziroğlu’s artwork is the negative space of his designs, significantly less cluttered than that found in traditional 'kilim' compositions and Anatolian weaving. His refined compositions and the images he creates stand on one of the principles of fine arts, that is, an aesthetic that opens space for shadow and light. While presenting sincere and contemporary images of people from his personal life in the most realistic way possible, made more pronounced through his method of weaving, his works bid the viewer to pause and examine them in more detail.

​

Cal Lane’s artwork is physical, reflective, and conceptual. She pokes fun at gender roles and the machismo long associated with sculptural expression. Lane deconstructs the modernist image of the pure industrial object, by manually cutting into the form and redefining it. Building on her history as a welder, she cuts into solid steel objects with a plasma torch to create open, laced patterns. The juxtaposition of steel, a traditionally masculine and industrial material used in objects like oil drums, shovels, car hoods and barbells with the patterns of lace, associated with femininity and domesticity, provides viewers an opportunity to examine their personal assumptions about gender. She finds it quite amusing to take industrial products and carve them into useless delicate objects, saying, “It’s a funny way to visually rebel against a past that no longer seems relevant.”

​

Micha Serraf’s practice is centered around rewriting the trauma of displacement with the imagined memory of celebration, homage and childlike wonder. His work is often informed by memories he has from when he was a child in Zimbabwe and his endeavor to understand the deep nostalgia he feels toward the seemingly unfamiliar. Serraf works across multiple mediums, expressing his complex and nuanced perspective with elegance and restraint through photography, tapestry, sculpture and painting. In pursuit of memory, identity and a place to call home, his work is grounded in a nostalgia of personal and ancestral experience, of what never was, and of what could have been—caught in an entanglement between ancestral history and utopian optimism.

​

Roxa Smith is a Brooklyn-based, Venezuelan American artist whose color-filled work renders the decorative patterns, furnishings and views from inside places that represent her honor of family and history, and the love she feels for home and culture. With North American roots dating back to the Mayflower combined with South American origins, her work explores the paradox of belonging and not belonging, the layers of identity bridging her southern and northern dual heritage, and the sense of isolation she has experienced. After years as a California-based plein-air landscape painter, Smith moved to New York City, inspiring a new focus on interiors that often lead the eye to outward views. She channels her memories, observations and sensibilities related to current events, art history, culture, access, luxury, class, safety, freedom and nature into colorfully dense renderings of living spaces and iconic locations that communicate on multiple levels.

 

For more information, please contact: info@c24gallery.com or follow us on Instagram @c24gallery.

​

Press:

The Art Newspaper

​

​