Metin Özgör

Who is Metin Özgör? (1988)

Born in 1988, he graduated from Selçuk University, Ahmet Keleşoğlu Faculty of Education, Department of Fine Arts, Painting and Art Education in 2010. Between 2012 and 2016, he worked as a Visual Arts Teacher in Harran and Suruç, Şanlıurfa. After experimental art studies and theoretical research between 2010 and 2019, he produced a series of geometric abstract paintings between 2019 and 2024. From 2024 onwards, he began producing graphic figurative works exploring the concept of the body within the framework of boundaries, examining concepts such as society, individual, and identity. He completed his Master’s degree in Painting at Trakya University, Faculty of Fine Arts in 2023. Since 2016, he has continued to work as a painting teacher in Istanbul and pursues his artistic work in his own studio.

Post-Anatomy:

This series reduces the body to a point of zero, stripping it of its classical forms of representation and reinterpreting it through concepts such as power, identity, individual, society, status, medical aesthetics, and fashion. From a plastic perspective, it is based on pictograms, which I describe as modern cave paintings. Pictograms are the modern graphical versions of petrographs found in primitive rock paintings and cave wall drawings. We encounter these simple graphical drawings in daily life and public spaces. These simple drawings, devoid of hands, feet, fingers, and faces, represent for me the zero point of the body. This zero point signifies the disappearance—the erasure—of anatomy, but also represents a threshold where the possibility of rethinking the body is possible, a threshold we can call post-anatomy. Post-anatomy is an intellectual space where the body, stripped of its anatomical, cultural, and symbolic burdens, reaches a point of zero, where representation dissolves, and forms disintegrate. Modern anatomy defined the body as a rational, measurable, and universal system. However, post-anatomy goes beyond this definition; it no longer views the body as a readable map, but as a carrier of uncertainty, emptiness, and multiple identities. These body representations, reduced to a zero point, exist on the fine line between being nobody and being everyone. Thus, a male pictogram can represent a single male individual while also possessing the inclusiveness of representing all men, and this is also true for a representation of a woman or a child. Post-anatomy presents the body as a ‘post-representational object.’ It does not represent, it implies. It does not narrate, it reminds. It does not show, it prefers to suggest. In this way, our image of the body disintegrates, to be reconstructed. The absence of the body prepares the ground for its new existence.