Mehmet Kaya

Who is Mehmet Kaya (1983-Mersin)
Mehmet Kaya was born in 1983 in Silifke district of Mersin. He graduated from the painting department of Silifke High School in 2001. He graduated from Sivas Cumhuriyet University, Faculty of Education, Fine Arts Department, Department of Painting Teaching in 2005. During his university years, he participated in a personal exhibition and many mixed exhibitions and organized workshops. He taught in his own studio for two years. He came to Istanbul in 2008 and gave visual arts and art therapy application lessons to mentally disabled students at the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality Disabled Department. He worked as an instructor at the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality Vocational Training Courses (İSMEK) from 2011 to 2017.

He was the coordinator in many exhibitions and organizations related to the disabled. He has been continuing his work in his own studio in Bakırköy since 2017.

Art Perspective;
Mehmet Kaya addresses women’s expressions in his works. Woman has always been an aesthetic figure that has been used as a metaphor and artistic subject. The artist has examined the relationship between woman, identity, the female body, the concept of beauty, commodity, and consumer culture in today’s postmodern era. This understanding was influenced by the narrative characteristics of women and men in Greek mythology. The focus on women’s aesthetics, beauty, elegance; and men’s power, violence, and muscle descriptions formed the subject selection. Of course, in the historical process, women themselves have been objectified in the real sense and shaped by societies and men in many ways, and femicides are a very clear example of this. Men, on the other hand, have moved the concept of power beyond muscle by using money in the form of both objectification and objectification. Postmodernism has highlighted the face and especially the eyes in the body. The face was the most individualized part of the body, and for this reason, portraits and face-based identity have become stronger in the process of modernization and civilization after the 18th century. For this reason, the artist particularly uses the colors imposed on the subconscious in the consumer society and advertisements in portraits in his works. Green emphasizes naturalness because it is the color of nature, sexy and provocative feelings are conveyed with red, while white inspires innocence, peace and trust in women. Green is the opposite color of red and in his works, he creates contrast by using opposite colors and strengthens the expressions. He uses icons, symbols and shapes (bar codes, symbols of slavery, etc.) that refer to consumption, which he attributes hidden meanings to the portraits. While transferring these aspects of women to the canvas, he takes inspiration from the creation of Pandora, the first woman in Greek mythology, from soil and mud, and creates a background on the canvas as if it were soil with plenty of painting using relief paste made of different materials and contrasting colors.