ARUCAD MASTER’S CLASS Student Exhibition 2021

As a collector who has studied industrial design, I have always been excited to follow the developments in the field of art and to experience contemporary and innovative mediums. As the founder, and at present a graduate student of Arkın University of Creative Arts and Design (ARUCAD), within the framework of my mission, I wanted both to experience what can be created within the possibilities offered by the university’s state-of-the-art workshops (digital studio, glass workshop, 3D printing, etc.) through my own work and maybe to be a source of inspiration for our future students by intentionally using as many mediums as available at ARUCAD to indicate the diversity of opportunities.

My studies started as an effort to produce a new work based on the emotions that works of great artists stir in me. When we look at the history of art, we see that producing works inspired by existing works is a method that is frequently used. At this point, the important thing is to grasp the understanding of art of the period in which the work was created, and to take the pre-existing a step forward, both technically and philosophically, without imitating it.

One of the best examples of this is Rodin, who carried the 19th century Romanticism to the 20th century’s modern sculpture understanding. Known for his admiration for Michelangelo, Rodin took his place as a pioneer in the history of art with the masterpieces he created. The human body and figurative works constitute the basic element of the Romantic period sculpture. The aim of the artist of this period was to reflect the thought behind it rather than revealing the classical form. By carrying this concern for the reality and pose of the figure further, Rodin has taken the pursuit of reflecting the mood, passion and emotion of the model to the audience with all its nakedness to the extreme.

As I mentioned above, the issue is not just to produce another work of art by looking at a work of art, but to carry the artistic understanding that is articulated through the work created a step further. In this context, if I should talk about my main works, I reproduced Rodin’s ‘Titan IV’ sculpture as a digital plexiglass cut. I also reinterpreted Dalou’s ‘Head of a Sleeping Baby’, another artist of the same period, as a baby figure representing purity and hope, using ceramics, glass and other materials. Using live model photography and 3D scan techniques, I created the figure of a dead soldier laying upside down in the mud as a manifestation of war’s -the extreme point of man’s evilness and cruelty- degrading of human dignity. The body figure with tied hands and feet, which I created as a representation of the fact that democracy has not been fully embraced, especially in the Middle East, has come into being as a reflection of a questioning and transforming attitude in the face of the contradictions and injustices imposed by the system.