Baris Gokturk
is a Turkish artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. He teaches at John Hopkins University, Parsons School of Design and Columbia University where he has got his MFA in 2020. He was an ApexArt fellow in Seoul, artist-in-residence at ISCP, LMCC and YADDO, as well as a participant in Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and SOMA Mexico. Gokturk has shown his work internationally in the US, Germany, Spain, France, Korea, Turkey and Puerto Rico. Recent museum exhibitions include Pera Museum in Istanbul and SECCA in Winston-Salem, NC. He recently completed a mural for Columbia University’s Butler Library and a commission by the Public Art Fund as part of Art on the Grid. His solo exhibition Public Secret could be seen at Helena Anrather Gallery in New York.
Artist Statement
My work is between and across media. I am particularly interested in the idea of transposition, creating a visual system seemingly made for one medium (eg. drawing) and then treating it in another medium (eg. sculpture). I reshuffle conceived notions about traditional media such as drawing, painting and sculpture. I break each down to its fundamental elements and reconfigure them as parts of the other. The physical slippages between image, surface and material in my work is a reflection of the conceptual slippages between image and meaning in the wider cultural and political contexts.