Istanbul, Atakoy I
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2 sizes available
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Murat Germen
SLAT ART With his Slat Art editions, Murat German is carving a new artistic path while staying true to his unmistakeable style. This extraordinary, dual-layered technique is the perfect evolution… Read more
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Istanbul, Eyup I
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2 sizes available
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Hong Kong I
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Brighton I
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Background Information about Murat Germen
Introduction
SLAT ART
With his Slat Art editions, Murat German is carving a new artistic path while staying true to his unmistakeable style. This extraordinary, dual-layered technique is the perfect evolution of Germen’s characteristic aesthetic and makes the photograph positively intoxicating. A second layer is split into strips and mounted above the initial photo to create a distinct visual effect that is both exciting and intriguing. The urban jungle in all its diversity unfolds before our eyes. The artist unifies the dimensions of time and space in an exceptional art form that provides entirely new perspectives on the city.
Murat Germen – The Fascination of Cities
The Turkish artist Murat German belongs to the most well-known photographers of his country, and this despite that fact that his defining approach is to use photography as a medium for depicting mistrust. “Photography records the surface information, where one can only depict the exterior features of objects (color, texture, shape, etc.) and the resulting visual representation cannot incorporate the internal condition / content / soul. I also aim to make photos that carry the many traces of time, multiple dimensions of space and finally create photos usually invisible to the naked eye…”
Murat German should perhaps be viewed less as a photographer, and more as a photo artist who uses photography to transcend the genre itself. He is able to do this by digital editing his material on computer. “I tend to concentrate” he explains “on extracting beauty out of ordinary. I attempt to defamiliarize ordinariness, render it ambiguous by alienating it from its familiar context and finally make people to ‘see it afresh…”
The Professor for Art, Photography, and New Media at Sabanci University has long been interested in urban landscapes and architecture, and was actually educated as a town planner and architect. To portray cities as one experiences them, however, is no easy task. A simple shot of a city reveals nothing about the feelings that grip us when we first visit it. The muddle of streets, the diverse architectonic styles, the traces left behind everywhere by previous eras. It seems that Murat Germen has found a way, through photography, to capture the many difference faces of a city. He uses photography not as a means to depict reality, but rather as an artistic form of expression and an instrument through which to explore his environment.
The images in his series “The Many Windows” all have the same format: 60 narrow strips taken from different photographs appear on the left, and flow into a singular photograph on the right. The impression created is one of intense urban thickening; a compression of space. This captures more of the city than would be possible with a single shot. The image appears both foreign and familiar – as a cityscape it is unknown to us, but we recognise the inner emotion of a complex, historically layered space basic photography could never produce. Murat Germen’s compositions emerge from experiments on the computer with vertical strips. The results are fascinating compressions, successful aesthetic translations of urbanity.
With his Slat Art editions, Murat German is carving a new artistic path while staying true to his unmistakeable style. This extraordinary, dual-layered technique is the perfect evolution of Germen’s characteristic aesthetic and makes the photograph positively intoxicating. A second layer is split into strips and mounted above the initial photo to create a distinct visual effect that is both exciting and intriguing. The urban jungle in all its diversity unfolds before our eyes. The artist unifies the dimensions of time and space in an exceptional art form that provides entirely new perspectives on the city.
Murat Germen – The Fascination of Cities
The Turkish artist Murat German belongs to the most well-known photographers of his country, and this despite that fact that his defining approach is to use photography as a medium for depicting mistrust. “Photography records the surface information, where one can only depict the exterior features of objects (color, texture, shape, etc.) and the resulting visual representation cannot incorporate the internal condition / content / soul. I also aim to make photos that carry the many traces of time, multiple dimensions of space and finally create photos usually invisible to the naked eye…”
Murat German should perhaps be viewed less as a photographer, and more as a photo artist who uses photography to transcend the genre itself. He is able to do this by digital editing his material on computer. “I tend to concentrate” he explains “on extracting beauty out of ordinary. I attempt to defamiliarize ordinariness, render it ambiguous by alienating it from its familiar context and finally make people to ‘see it afresh…”
The Professor for Art, Photography, and New Media at Sabanci University has long been interested in urban landscapes and architecture, and was actually educated as a town planner and architect. To portray cities as one experiences them, however, is no easy task. A simple shot of a city reveals nothing about the feelings that grip us when we first visit it. The muddle of streets, the diverse architectonic styles, the traces left behind everywhere by previous eras. It seems that Murat Germen has found a way, through photography, to capture the many difference faces of a city. He uses photography not as a means to depict reality, but rather as an artistic form of expression and an instrument through which to explore his environment.
The images in his series “The Many Windows” all have the same format: 60 narrow strips taken from different photographs appear on the left, and flow into a singular photograph on the right. The impression created is one of intense urban thickening; a compression of space. This captures more of the city than would be possible with a single shot. The image appears both foreign and familiar – as a cityscape it is unknown to us, but we recognise the inner emotion of a complex, historically layered space basic photography could never produce. Murat Germen’s compositions emerge from experiments on the computer with vertical strips. The results are fascinating compressions, successful aesthetic translations of urbanity.
Bio
| 1965 | Born in Istanbul, Turkey |
| 1983-1987 | Technical University of Istanbul, Turkey |
| 1988-1992 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA |
| Lives and works in Istanbul, Turkey |
Awards
| 2007 | 2nd place & 8 honorable mention awards, International Photography Awards (IPA) |
| 2002 | Lawrence B. Anderson Award |
| 1992 | Aia Henry Adams Gold Medal |
Grants
| 1988 - 1990 | Fulbright Scholarship |
| 1990 | Aga Khan Summer Travel Grant |
Exhibitions
Solo Exhibitions
| 2012 | C.A.M Gallery,The Solo Project, Basel, Switzerland |
| Muta-Morphosis, Rosier Gallery, USA | |
| 2011 | Muta-Morphosis, C.A.M Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey |
| Muta-Morphosis, ARTITLED! Contemporary Art Gallery, Herpen, Netherlands | |
| 2010 | Way, Istanbul Modern Photography Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey |
| 2009 | Aura, C.A.M Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey |
| 2006 | Inside the Arsenal Shipyard, Istanbul, Turkey |
Group Exhibitions
| 2012 | Ali’s Koço, Milli Reasurans Art Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey |
| Rosier Gallery, artMRKT San Francisco, USA | |
| 2011 | Destruction 2011, Istanbul, Turkey |
| Unbounded, Proje 4L - Elgiz Contemporary Art Museum, Istanbul, Turkey | |
| La production de l’espace, ALANistanbul Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey | |
| Mixology 2011, ARTITLED! Contemporary Art Gallery, Herpen, Netherlands | |
| Saint Joseph 140. Year Tribute, Saint Joseph Lycée, Istanbul, Turkey | |
| Humankind, NY Photography Festival, Powerhouse Arena, Brooklyn, New York, USA | |
| Collective Intimacy, C.A.M Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey | |
| 2010 | Port Izmir 2, International Contemporary Art Triennial, Izmir, Turkey |
| Chaotic Metamorphosis, Proje 4L - Elgiz Contemporary Art Museum, Istanbul, Turkey | |
| Infinite+, CER modern, Ankara, Turkey | |
| 2009 | Ars Accidentalis, C.A.M Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey |
| Chronophotography, Computational Aesthetics 2009 Art Gallery, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada | |
| Becoming Istanbul, Deutsches Architektur Zentrum, Berlin, Germany | |
| Becoming Istanbul, al Riwaq Gallery, al Manama, Bahrain | |
| 2008 | Becoming Istanbul, Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany |
| Ne hal’in varsa gor!, Play Studio Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey | |
| Turkish Realities: Positions in Contemporary Photography from Türkei, Fotografie Forum Frankfurt, Frankfurt/Main, Germany | |
| Turkish Photography Today, FotoDepartament, St. Petersburg, Russia | |
| 2007 | Virtual Architecture; Reconstructing Architecture through Photography, SIGGRAPH 2007 Art Gallery, San Diego, USA |
| My Land, My Body, Arcola Theatre London, GB | |
| 2006 | Caroun Photo Club (CPC) First Annual Photography Exhibition, Teheran, Iran |
| Reading the Space as an Entity, Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, SIGGRAPH 2006 Art Gallery, Boston, USA | |
| 2005 | Reading the City as an Entity, Istanbul, Turkey |