Titled "AM I A FRUIT OR A WOUND WITH MY SHELLS?", the exhibition features the artist's paintings, accompanied by familiar faces, memorized lines, and moments we know but have forgotten. Özbakır approaches us through the question he poses to himself, with the sadness he places in our eyes, and by lifting the scab from our own wounds…
Cem Adrian's song "YARA" (Wound), specially composed for the exhibition, will accompany the works throughout the exhibition at Kun Art Space.
About the Exhibition:
With this exhibition, Mustafa Özbakır doesn't place us in front of a mirror, but in a "fog." When we begin to search for ourselves in that fog, we realize that the taste of the fruit and the ache of the wound are nourished from the same root. The artist's palette doesn't tell us to see the world more clearly, but to turn our gaze deeper. Amidst the fog; The body and the tree trunk, the skin and the bark, the juicy and sweet inside of the fruit and the salt of tears are caught in each other's vortex. When the scab of the wound transforms into the seed of the fruit, light ceases to be a mere seepage and becomes the very heavy silence accumulated within matter itself. In Mustafa Özbakır's canvases, the face ceases to be a representational space; it transforms into that insurmountable wall of memory upon which time accumulates, each scratch built like a brick. The fog does not bury objects in uncertainty; on the contrary, it imprisons them in their own essence, their rigid and pure presence. Here, the shell is not merely skin covering the flesh, but a hard envelope, a building block, in which existence conceals its own tragedy. When a person passes through this fog, like a fruit returning to its seed, they encounter the most solid architecture of their own pain. And the source of this pain is not the healing of the wound, but the courage to hold in one's hand the hard truth that lies beneath that shell, that indivisible seed.
Özbakır's paintings attempt to peel back the layers without resorting to an artificial construction of melancholy. The faces and bodies aren't set at the dramatic climax of a story, but rather seem to have emerged from within a narrative, dusted and touched by words. For an art historian, this kind of pictorial language inevitably curves towards the portrait tradition. Rembrandt's self-portraits, where he leans over his own face, reflect a calm, stubborn, time-worn sense of truth; Caravaggio's light pulling figures out of darkness; Géricault's transformation of the "human face" into a social wound… Mentioning these names isn't to add Özbakır's paintings to a "list of masters." It's for something simpler: to be able to read these paintings not only as an aesthetic object of the face, but also as a surface of witness.
Who is Mustafa Özbakır?
Born in Adana in 1982, Mustafa Özbakır graduated from the Painting Department of the Faculty of Fine Arts at Mersin University. His works have been featured in numerous national and international events, and he continues his work in his studio in Adana.
Mustafa Ozbakir's solo exhibition, titled "Am I a Fruit or a Wound with My Shells?", with an exhibition text written by Nazlı Pektaş, can be viewed at Adana KUN Art Space every day except Sundays from 12:00 to 18:00 until February 28th.
Source: https://www.magazinci.com/icerikler/kultur-sanat/mustafa-ozbakir-rsquo-dan-yeni-sergi-rsquo--rsquo-kabuklarimla-bir-meyve-miyim-yara-mi-rsquo--rsquo-_84842.html