Gallery Ilayda present 'Pop' a solo exhibition by Gazi Sansoy

Renaissance paintings involve criticism and caricaturing of noble and powerful classes. Artists picture ostentatious lives of dominant families in their paintings in a more exaggerated and more satiric way; and by doing so they make soft criticisms. This is a point beyond time in which Sansoy meets with Renaissance artists. While Sansoy has great admiration to these works in terms of their value as paintings, he criticizes their themes. By erasing the heroes of religion, noble, rich and pretentious lives from where they belong to, he “ridicules” them, in his own words.

Sansoy takes photos of the paintings he works on in different museums around the world. He takes the frames of the painting into to scope while he is printing on canvas. He even gets some of them framed with plastic frames which look like wood. As well as strengthening the absurd part of his intervention, he also emphasizes their identity as museum objects. This tricky intervention to masterpieces of serious looking museums also touches to the history of art. Holy personalities, mythological characters, and noblemen are heroes who compos the story of art. History of art speaks about them, interprets, judges, and narrates them, keeps them alive or kills them. Replacing their images with a non-artistic intervention and their de-identification in a way provoke the reinterpretation and evaluation of history of art. Spectators are invited once more to fill in the gaps in the art history.

Gazi Sansoy’s great admiration to European Renaissance painting and his desire to exist within them come into being in his simple and unique intervention to digitally printed copies of these paintings on canvas. As a result of the topics and areas it infiltrates in and the technique used, Faceless Series, rising from this starting point, provides a very rich sight enabling a multidimensional reading.

“Pop” will remain on view until September 28th,  2014 at Zorlu Center PSM.

ZORLU CENTER PSM

Visiting Hours: 10 am. to 10 pm.

Zorlu Center, 34340, Beşiktaş, İstanbul

Tel: 0 850 222 67 76