Ekin Saçlıoğlu

Galeri Nev welcomes Ekin Saçlıoğlu to their new address on Kırlangıç street. The exhibition, carrying the title “The Earth’s Remains and New Flowers” will open on Wednesday evening, April 4th. Working with a terrific diversity of materials, the artist derives paintings, drawings and sculptures from each of them and displays them all within a rich installation. The works of the artist replace each other by turning animals and plants, memories and metaphors, dreams and stories inside out, when looked closer at this arrangement which is of a variety of dualities such as real-fiction, natural-artificial, living-inanimate, they gather around three themes. The first, lets us think about choosing or being forced to become camouflaged, being invisible in an environment or community, through animals. Ekin Saçlıoğlu draws these animals which disappear into their natural environment with pen and ink. Meanwhile as the artist partially transforms their natural surroundings, she also intervenes with the animal’s belonging to the area. This interruption creates a basic reference point for re-evaluating many political interventions. The second theme consists of almost encyclopedic patterns of animals that fall under the soil, melt, dissolve, decompose, and become unrecognizable in time. The massive dimensions of the charcoal drawings suggest, on the one hand, that they were gigantic remnants of prehistoric times, where everything was in giant proportions. On the other hand, it gives the impression that the tiny remnants are trying to be understood by being magnified under a microscope. These drawings, which are usually composed of bones and tissues, are supported by three-dimensional pieces that virtually emerge out of them. Thus, the viewer witnesses, even participates in an archaeological work on what remains of a civilization we have not yet known. Other three-dimensional works in the show and a canvas accompanying them are based on the theme of vulnerability. Rights and injustice, justice and violence are represented by a baton suddenly confronting us through the branches and leaves of the plants in nature. Drawing attention to sudden tensions between our personal agendas and the global agenda, with a "flower" that has no possibility to sprout and bloom, here these tensions are in fact rooted out.
Ekin Saçlıoğlu completed her undergraduate and graduate education in the Department of Painting at Mimar Sinan University. She is continuing the proficiency in arts program at Yıldız Technical University, at the Faculty of Art and Design. Her first solo exhibition opened in Istanbul in 2004, alongside this the artist was invited for group exhibitions at countless international settings, among them were Austria, Germany, Sweden and Greece. The most recent solo exhibit before Galeri Nev was seen at Galata Greek School in 2017 under the heading ‘‘These Are Not Fables, Children''. A piece from this exhibit was also featured in the Abdülmecid Efendi Pavilion during the “Doors Open to Those Who Knock,” exhibition from parallel events of the Istanbul Biennial.