Island-Continent I

Murat Akagündüz, whose works including natural and urban landscapes examine the memory of the geography in which he lives, focuses on how political and cultural conditions and current technology transform people’s perspectives. The artist derives his paintings –created through the abstraction and reconstruction of ready-made images– from photographs, his own travel impressions and memories, and even from Google Earth images.

Akagündüz produced the paintings in his series "Island-Continent" simultaneously with the series "Homeland-Anatolia" between 2010 and 2012. Containing references to modern art and cultural policies, the paintings in "Homeland-Anatolia" emphasise the historical and cultural aspects of a landscape, based on the images he captured and the sketches he made during his trip to Anatolia. In the "Island-Continent" series, created with resin on canvas, Akagündüz sets off from his childhood memories of the Istanbul-Yalova trips he made with his father. Inspired by Sivriada, the smallest island off the coast of Istanbul, these paintings aim to look at a rock through abstraction, to concentrate on a personal journey based on the political narratives surrounding a particular geography. The island motif turns into an inner journey for the artist, implicating concepts such as near and far, heaven and hell, isolation and loneliness. Working with pitch in this earlier series, Akagündüz takes advantage of the transparency of resin, and of its sensitivity to heat and light. This organic material, which conceals the brushstrokes, enables the artist, and therefore his paintings, to achieve an anonymous quality.