An exhibition featuring Kerem Ozan Bayraktar, Meltem Sırtıkara, and Semih Zeki — graduates of Devabil Kara’s studio — along with Hatice Karadağ and Mete Erdoğan from Zafer Mintaş’s studio, comes together at Pg Art Gallery. Devabil Kara and Zafer Mintaş will also accompany these five young artists with their own works.
At the Painting Department of the Faculty of Fine Arts at Marmara University, the studios led by Devabil Kara and Zafer Mintaş aim to create an environment in which students can explore subjects grounded in lived experience, make use of the infinite possibilities of plastic expression, and evaluate opportunities to work with diverse tools and materials within their own areas of interest. Rather than focusing solely on established aesthetic problems, the studios encourage students to identify and discuss new, previously unarticulated questions.
Offering a space where creative ideas are debated and provoked, these two studios possess a dynamic structure that values opposing viewpoints and nourishes and develops itself through them. Aiming for an aesthetic perception that goes beyond object and form, the studios provide education not only in the aesthetics of the organic, but within a broader framework of artistic thought. Instead of adhering to the outdated aesthetics of naturalism, they offer students an environment in which they can shape their art within a conceptual framework aligned with philosophy and art — without privileging any specific technical medium.
Continuing the “Bir Önerme 7 Öneri” (One Proposition, Seven Proposals) Devabil Kara Studio exhibition series initiated in 2007, Pg Art Gallery now sustains this framework through the exhibition “Proposition II.” With 15 years of experience and a commitment to introducing emerging and young artists to the Turkish art scene, Pg Art Gallery hosts this exhibition, which consists of artistic practices expressed through abstractions concerning time, space, the individual, and the individual’s inner world.