Galeri Nev begins its 2024-2025 season with Erol Akyavaş. The exhibition, which will showcase the artist’s sketchbooks for the first time, takes its name from a faintly written note in one of the books: "Quiet on the Surface, Raging at the Core”. Galeri Nev is proud to loudly share the extraordinary world hidden within these seemingly ordinary and quiet notebooks, sealed with their identical kraft-colored covers and brown cloth bindings.
A total of fifteen sketchbooks, unearthed from the artist’s archives, will also be displayed in digital formats, allowing viewers to examine them page by page. Through this, the gallery invites everyone to trace the presence of Akyavaş as an architect, a painter, perhaps a calligrapher, undoubtedly a photographer, and at times an explorer, inventor, and poet. As one follows these traces, as sketches and notes come together, these ‘logbooks’ lead us to some of the masterpieces of Akyavaş, which we all admire. This direct witness to the artist’s creative process, the ebb and flow of his thoughts—sometimes stagnant, sometimes bursting into flames that seem to burn through several the pages—offers a unique contribution not only to Akyavaş’s personal history but to Art History itself.
In 2015, Galeri Nev was the first to exhibit Akyavaş’s photographic work. Now, with this exhibition, the gallery continues to complete, page by page, what is uniquely his dictionary, or as he called it, the "Encyclopedia of Nonexistent Information." Yet, as new insights about Akyavaş emerge, the mystery deepens instead of resolving. Akyavaş’s family, who has graciously allowed us to lose ourselves within the intimate pages, will travel from America to Ankara to attend the opening and share extraordinary anecdotes about these notebooks, which include indecipherable scribbles, mundane notes, shopping lists, and phone numbers.
The "Quiet on the Surface, Raging at the Core” will open on the 5th of October Saturday and will be on view at Galeri Nev until November the 9th.
