THE PAINTING UNIVERSE OF GÜLTEN IMAMOĞLU
Çerkes Karadağ

Ambiguity functions as a curtain hiding negativity which is created at the environs of art, in the world where the human is faced with dearth and massacre and has become unimportant. In an environment where artistic concepts and designs devoid of content and based on assumption are dictated to us as pieces of art, these propensities are trying to exclude real artistic thought, style and creative workmanship from life. Indeed, seeing real pieces of art as reactionism is a natural result of this process where presentation of an idea in a manner which is not permanent, is hastily and carelessly turned into fashion. The non-necessity of the creative ability which is stripped from its natural soul should not be seen as abnormality. In this new process, traditional art based on creativity in a sense is trying to be excluded by a supreme manifest which is sanctifying ordinary objects with simple arrangements.

Gülten İmamoğlu, who settles her artistic designs on the slippery ground of abstract figures, is an artist who manages to deconstruct “incomprehensiveness” and to explain the meaning of features of abstract art which are commonly accepted. She helps us to understand the abstraction by catching us from another “lane” in an environment where the art is metamorphosed. She makes us comprehend that colours are the artist’s maneuvering area. Without falling into the trap of today’s propensity which is turned into fashion, she manages to turn her paintings into a concept. She adopts the universal phenomenons like birth, death, life and motion with the countercurrents of painting’s abstract expression and makes death usual, life dynamic and movements clear. In a sense, she prefers to imprison us into her paintings which makes us meet our inner selves.

Gülten İmamoğlu is an introverted artist. It is obvious that she likes to bring the light of an invisible universe up to the surface. She introduces herself as a colour worker to us. She makes the colours livable and touchable by saving them from a fake coloured visual world. By bringing together her intuitions and utopias with a spectators’ reality, she associates them with the meanings of colourful and dynamic paintings. Images of the artist, which make life and death related, moreover connected, which are seen at the same platform on life and death planes equal and identical.

She manages to bring together dynamism of beauty with stability of death, infinity of thought with concreteness of art and the mercilessness of reality with livability of dreams. Colours are not seen as colours in her paintings, but as a vortex reminding us of a natural disaster. Opening our eyes to far horizons, they actually deal with meaningful and unexpected blows to our inner world. Its caressing is like a heavy slap on the face, its fluidity is like an escape sometimes borrowed but intractable. To tell the truth, the painter is skilled enough to escape from us and to take shelter in her colourful universe. She likes colour countercurrents and she does not hesitate to shoot us with that gun. Defining Gülten İmamoğlu as an artist who attacks us with colours and defends herself with colours would not be wrong, as she makes her colours a hurtful, exuberant, and a livable paradise.

Gülten İmamoğlu’s paintings exalt an abstract language where figures are mixed by dancing, in a sense. She paints chromatic motions with a figure of fastidiousness and carries us to a perception, which is familiar to us. She concretizes the indefiniteness of figures with meaningful integrity of colours. Thus, she makes a personal, original and clear contribution to a figurative translation which we took from classism. While the paintings act as examples of the contemporariness which she had internalized, they do not estrange to the traditional art forms. Hence, on one hand they are academic, on the other hand, they wink to prodigality of a spendthrift bohemian. While they are displaying the reflections of an adventureous soul, they do not relinquish from a domestic sacred.

We really have to understand Gülten İmamoğlu’s directing her emotional and creative impasses to us as a heavy criticism. When we consider the artistic environment as one of the most important facts for art to develop, worries of the artist; who is working in Samsun as an academic, we can understand the artist better. While Gülten İmamoğlu is converting the colour to expression, motion to action and form to life, she also makes contribution in converting the lonely struggle in a barren art environment and anger to art.

When we turn back to contemporary Turkish painting, we cannot turn our head away from Gülten İmamoğlu’s ability of specific workmanship which is unprejudiced and away from imitation, who is running in a different lane with her simplicity and the forms she creates. In an environment, where many painters are submitted to the reality of a photograph and see the impasse of ambiguity as an abstraction, paintings of Gülten İmamoğlu not only make us look at them, but also bring movement deeply to our perception by imprisoning our conscious into its motion. They cry the great meaning of creativity and effort against artistic games.

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Notes to Editors:

Hay Hill Gallery founded in 1995 as a legal entity, has recently relocated to Cork Street. The Hay Hill Gallery was founded as a joint venture between the Russian company Art Service Centre Ltd with over nine years experience of the international art scene, and the British company Sirin Ltd. The Hay Hill Gallery continues to introduce modern artists whose work pays homage to academic traditions; and mount exhibitions focussing on sculpture and international art.

Gülten İmamoğlu