Icons of Time

One of the pioneers of contemporary art in Turkey, Füsun Onur’s artistic practice spans more than half a century, from the 1960s to the present. Onur graduated from the Department of Sculpture at Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts in 1957 and continued her art education in the US. Her works focus on form, space, time, and the relations between these concepts. As the diversity of materials multiplied in the artist’s production, her work expanded to include everyday, narrative, and even autobiographical elements. In the 1980s, Onur used ordinary, everyday materials to explore the relationship between painting and frame and between sculpture and painting, developing a highly idiosyncratic language that eradicates the borders between these categories.
“Icons of Time” is an installation in which Füsun Onur combines elements of light and shadow with the relationship between frame and painting, located on the border that unites as well as divides inside and outside. Though the frames in this installation don’t readily reveal what they are at first glance, they resemble flimsy doors and windows. These frames, partially covered with amorphous pieces of leather used in a traditional form of Turkish shadow theatre (Karagöz), seem to have been taken from the walls where they belong and are trying to forge a new order amongst themselves in the new space where they have been dispersed.

"What Time Is It?", exhibition view, Arter, 2019.