Daydreams

March 5, 2021 – April 11, 2021

Galeri Nev Istanbul, İstiklâl Caddesi Mısır Apt. No: 163 Kat: 4 Daire: 23 Beyoğlu İstanbul

A gentle landing for gallery-goers as Galeri Nev reopens its doors in the splendid Mısır Apartmanı with new group exhibition of great subtlety by Mike Berg, Selçuk Demirel, Melek Mazıcı, Esra Özdoğan and Aras Seddigh. Paintings, drawings, photographs and sculptures are included, all conceived to set the viewer dreaming: timeless, spaceless, undefined scenes, figures retrieved from distant memories… in short, dreamscapes, but never whimsical.

The Istanbul-based artist Mike Berg’s Untitled, left, is a beautifully balanced composition that feels almost like an aerial view of Çatalhöyük. Pure therapy for eye and mind. Who needs colour?

Restraint is the refrain in Selçuk Demirel’s In the Fragility of Life, below left: two slender figures step through a grove of fragile flower-trees, casting same pencil-thin shadows; painted a year before the world woke up to exactly how fragile the world is.

Melek Mazıcı is a Finnish-Turkish artist loved for her paintings of light. Although her work is often inspired by flowers, it becomes intensely abstract. And just in case you thought the world was fading away, Esra Özdoğan is there to give you the short sharp shock of the new. Aras Seddigh’s drawings in ink and acrylic are deliciously humorous, but why the title Suspicion?