Dividing Space on a White Piece of Paper

One of the early and most important representatives of Turkish contemporary art, Füsun Onur explores the relations between form, space, and time in her works which revolve around concepts and themes such as transience, memory, the subconscious, and the visible vs the invisible. In the 1960s and 1970s, the artist focused on these explorations and experimentations, and the materials she used gradually became more varied and expanded to include daily, narrative and autobiographical elements. As of the mid-1970s, Onur gravitated more and more away from traditional materials and towards ready-made objects and common domestic items. The artist has produced installations, interventions and sculptures, both indoors and outdoors, and as of the 1980s, started to question the relations between her production and the exhibition space, inviting the physical emptiness of these places into her works. Füsun Onur’s practice also highlights the idea of music, and she often includes contrasts of light/shadow, black/white and full/empty in her works.

"Dividing Space on a White Piece of Paper" is a collection of early drawings which provide one of the first examples of Füsun Onur’s interest in space, and its reconstruction. The work enables the audience to witness a negotiation created by linear overlaps and break-ups, which form a backdrop for stains ever-striving to gain volume, as they diversify and multiply in an effort to create space through the constant shape-shifting of empty and full, black and white, and dark and light.