Mübin Orhon, Onur Kılıç

As Mübin Orhon, born in 1924, approaches his centenary, Galeri Nev is preparing to open the last of a three-stage series of exhibitions that propose to juxtapose his works, often compared to the masters of abstract and monochrome painting such as Fontana, Hartung, Klein, Newman or Rothko, with three different names from three different generations of contemporary art.

The first exhibition of the series took place in Ankara in 2021. "Horror Vacui", where the works of Alev Ebüzziya and Mübin Orhon were showed together, was a combination of Ebüzziya's unique explorations of form and color with Mübin's experiments on staining that refuses to take form and light that refuses to stablize color. The second exhibition, organized in cooperaiton with Galerist in Istanbul in 2022, placed a slightly younger artist, Phoebe Cummings, next to Mübin. Subsequent to the void inside Alev Ebüzziya's bowls and the void behind Mübin Orhon's slits, this particular show paired Cummings' experience of annihilating her works with Orhon's experience of being annihilated: Phoebe Cummings' utterly baroque, floral, yet matte sculptures merges with Mübin's bright yet as unadorned as possible, even 'shapeless' gouaches. While Cummings reaches out towards the viewer with her branches growing out from the walls, Orhon tends to absorb us into the walls.

This new exhibition focuses on what is evoked by experiencing Mübin Orhon’s works not through the lens of his generation and his genre, but just the opoosite. Opening on February 4 at Galeri Nev, Orhon’s works centered around the year 1975 are joined this time by a very young artist, Onur Kılıç, born in 1995. Kılıç's works that are coming out of his studio for the first time to be included in the exhibition, share colors from Mübin's darkest, most obscure palette. Orhon's works, which usually have no direct reference to the world of forms and shapes, once again and probably for the last time, converse with form, with space, with objects, and with mysterious figures that wander around those spaces.

With his hundredth birthday just around the corner, what is revealed is that Mübin's art can speak every language, reflect stars from every universe; he is ageless. As his daughter and successor Bénédicte Orhon wrote, "for the eyes that know how to look" Mübin, just like his paintings, is eternal. And with its fourtieth birthday aprroaching, the exhibitions also underline Galeri Nev's standpoint about constructing the history of art in Turkey, by considering artists who are at the beginning of their practice together with the most established names. The aesthetics and spirit of the gallery's long-standing NevNesil and NevNadir exhibition series are being remembered once again around Mübin Orhon's name.

* In homage to Le Corbusier's "Poem of the Right Angle".