Dirimart is proud to present the solo show of Ebru Uygun The Sky a Silver, of her most recent works. Exhibition titled after E.E. Cummings’ eponymous poem; a lyric expression in the direct manner set to declare that the beauty of the experience of spring rain is proof of the power of beauty. Uygun’s works relate to The Sky a Silver in its references to nature, cycle of life and time. In Uygun’s work; pace, emphasis, and meaning are controlled by its repetitive nature, whereas in Cummings’ by the positioning of words, and the inclusion or omission of punctuation marks.
For more than twenty years, Ebru Uygun has presented a solid body of work as a painter, researching on the articulation of materials and forms. Uygun creates uninterrupted and precise dialogues between performance and painting; and with her choice of materials, the fundamental elements of paint and canvas, she highlights the power of this dialogue. The exhibition presents, for the first time, a work with which Uygun investigates the separation of paint and canvas as paint adopts a sculptural stance.
Uygun uses stripes akin to codes placed one beneath another to generate line-compositions. Unity reveals itself as a holding-together of the different. Long horizontal format of her paintings are charged with dynamism and movement, encouraging the beholder to move his/her eyes—and possibly the whole body—from left to right. A movement runs through the lines, binds them together and gives them significance. The viewer is stimulated to decipher what hides between the lines and the pursuit of verification is intensified with every next painting. One may find him/herself in a comparable state to when one listens to music or reads poetry as all have in common a strong regular repeated pattern of movement or sound: rhythm.
The exhibition carries a paradigm formed by a plethora of verbs: pouring, ripping, dripping, folding, sticking, and stretching. Withal, Uygun’s performative approach to painting charges her work with disinterested, self-conscious instinct that allows access to inner life and durations; inducing temporality into her work. By detaching herself from figural representation and by yielding to natural colors, Uygun’s abstract works draw the beholder into a cosmic realm where certain notes can be heard or felt.
Music as a non-representational art form has a long history of being conceived of as universally understandable, that produces a direct resonance in the mind. Paralleling this idea, Uygun aspires for a universal language based on intuitively understandable forms—that is, forms to which one would relate by means of an embodied, sympathetic intuition, rather than by means of intelligence. These forms themselves represent the vital substratum, the “intention of life” surfacing as movement in lines and planes. As the title The Sky a Silver suggests, the exhibition utterly resonates an image magical and metaphorical that appear and float in the air, to become a truth that sings in its own rhythm.
