Baris Gokturk
Baris Gokturk
Workspace Program Resident 2023
In the Studio
“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 painting and sculpture, and break each medium into its fundamental elements, such as pigment, texture and surface. 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. During my residency at Dieu Donne working with paper and its material processes allowed me to further explore these slippages by facilitating a continuously porous conversation between an image-idea and its physical materialization.”
- Baris Gokturk, 2023
Baris Gokturk explores and expands the boundaries between mediums, experimenting with object, surface, material, and texture to create wheat he calls “slippages between image and meaning.” His work restructures historical archives, documents and images to create layer objects and fragmented installations. At Dieu Donné, Gokturk fully embraced the experimental nature of working with paper pulp — building up and carving into pulp forms; using stencils and silkscreens; and layering and wrapping wet sheets in unconventional ways to push his own practice to new ends. Creating multiple iterations of works that draw from the same reference image, Gokturk explored the blurred lines between print, sculpture, drawing, and paper, as part of an ongoing conversation for the artist between mark and material.
About the Artist
Baris Gokturk is a Turkish artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. He is a recent graduate of Columbia University’s MFA program in sculpture. Recent and upcoming museum projects and exhibitions include SECCA in Winston-Salem, The Jewish Museum in New York, The Frost Art Museum in Miami, and Pera Museum in Istanbul. He also completed public commissions by Columbia University’s Butler Library and The Public Art Fund in New York . His solo exhibition Public Secret was on view at Helena Anrather Gallery, in New York, in the fall of 2021. Gokturk has shown his work in the United States and internationally in Germany, Spain, France, Korea, Turkey and Puerto Rico. His work has been featured in ArtForum, The BOMB Magazine and The Brooklyn Rail among others. Gokturk was an ApexArt fellow in Seoul, artist-in-residence at YADDO, and a participant in SOMA Mexico as well as Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In addition to his MFA from Columbia University in sculpture, he also holds an MFA in painting from Hunter College where he taught for seven years. He currently teaches at The New School and Columbia University. He also runs an art program for Johns Hopkins University’s neurology department. From 2011-2015, he ran with a group of artists a gallery and project space called Heliopolis in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He is the co-founder of Junte, an arts and culture project in Puerto Rico. He has contributed articles to Istanbul based bilingual art magazine RHsanat and the monthly political Post-Express since 2005. Gokturk recently finished artist-in-residence programs at LMCC Governor’s Island in New York, Fountainhead in Miami and at Siena Art Institute in Italy. He is currently working on upcoming projects in New York and Istanbul.
For more information, please visit his website.