As thinkers often interweave concepts to give them novel borders that allow new perceptions, Ayşe Erkmen dismantles the space and its constituents, insistent on exploring its multiform potential. In her first solo show Kıpraşım Ripple at Dirimart in 2017, Erkmen took down the white drywalls of the gallery in varying lengths and hung them from the beams on its ceiling displaying them as memory tablets. The otherwise hidden wooden panels riddled by its veiling drywalls had become the constitutive elements of this installation-exhibition.
Ayşe Erkmen returns to the gallery space she had left reminiscent of a worksite with her exhibition I insist, after five years. Here, she paints the drywalls that she took down in sixty four colors chosen from a color catalogue transforming them into monochrome paintings. Construction material, sculpture, painting… or everything is in everything. Ayşe Erkmen ripples the material, its function, the plane of perception of its viewer today as insistently as yesterday: I insist!
Ayşe Erkmen (b. Istanbul). She graduated from the Department of Sculpture, Mimar Sinan University in 1977. In 1993, she participated in the DAAD International Artist Residency Programme in Berlin. Erkmen worked as the Arnold Bode Professor at Kassel Art Academy in 1998–1999, as lecturer at Frankfurt Städelschule in 2000–2007 and at Münster Kunstakademie in 2008–2016. Among the international exhibitions Erkmen has participated in are the 2nd, 3rd and 13th Istanbul Biennial; the Turkish Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale; Manifesta 1, Shanghai, Berlin, Gwangju, Sharjah, Limerick, Scape, Ichihara, Aicihi biennials; and the Folkestone and Echigo-Tsumari triennials. Her recent shows include Beethoven Bewegt, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (2020); Whitish, Arter, Istanbul (2019); Kıpraşım Ripple, Dirimart, Istanbul (2017); A, SMAK, Ghent (2016); Une histoire, art, architecture et design, des années 80 à aujourd’hui, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2014); Ayşe Erkmen: Intervals, Barbican Center, London (2013). Erkmen participated in the Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017 with a project titled On Water and in the first edition of the Yorkshire Sculpture International 2019 with her project three of four. In 2020, she is granted the prestigious triennial Ernst Franz Vogelmann Sculpture Award, the first woman artist receiving it. She lives and works in Berlin and Istanbul.
