Never submerged forever
- Seda Yörüker
- 29 Oca
- 8 dakikada okunur
Held at Galerist between 15 January and 21 February 2026, in collaboration with Galeri Nev, Upon a Rock, I Grew, shaped around Melike Abasıyanık Kurtiç’s nature driven practice, offers a critical reading of the artist’s work through the dialogues established with her own productions
Words: Seda Yörüker
Melike Abasıyanık Kurtiç, Untitled, Undated, Watercolour on paper, 22 x 29 cm. Courtesy of the Abasıyanık Family and Galeri Nev
On 26 November 2012, Melike Abasıyanık Kurtiç called the office: “In your October issue, in the article on the Ankara State Museum of Painting and Sculpture, you placed my ceramic work alongside Süleyman Seyyit’s Still Life with Oranges in such a meaningful way. Zeynep Rona photocopied the page from the magazine and sent it to me. Thank you very much for taking an interest in my work,” she said. As an artist with a keen eye for objects, the relational dialogue between the two works had excited her. “In fact, I should be the one thanking you. Every time I encounter your works, I feel a deep admiration. You are a very special artist, and your sea urchins are truly unique,” I replied.
As is well known, Melike Abasıyanık Kurtiç was an artist who had very few exhibitions during her lifetime and whose works were shown only rarely. We had seen, in her solo exhibition titled Derin Doğa at Maçka Sanat Galerisi in 2008, that her practice was in fact a hidden treasure. Her work unfolded within a world of unusual originality, shaped around sea urchins as inward turning forms and seaweed as vertical forms. When selecting and scanning the images to accompany the article on the Ankara State Museum of Painting and Sculpture from the museum’s catalogue publication, I had made a particular point of including one of her works. Fourteen years ago, Melike Abasıyanık Kurtiç was a little known artist whose works, once encountered, created a kind of inner vibration, as if one had stumbled upon a treasure. In recent years, however, both the growing number of art institutions and the proliferation of group exhibitions² they organise, as well as the increasing presence of sponsorship support for the arts across different platforms, have made it possible for this situation to change. In this respect, the sponsorships in the field of ceramics undertaken by Kale Tasarım ve Sanat Merkezi, which appears to have played a major role in the perception of ceramics not as something buried in the past, or in the soil, but as a living and contemporary artistic practice, are particularly noteworthy. It was under the sponsorship of this institution that the retrospective exhibition titled Memoirs of a Sea Urchin – Melike Abasıyanık Kurtiç, held at the Erimtan Museum in 2024, finally enabled the artist’s work to come fully into view. The exhibition clearly revealed that she was not only a practitioner of ceramics, but a multifaceted artist who engaged closely with many different materials. One of the most moving aspects we encountered through this exhibition was the way in which, despite her extremely limited visibility during her lifetime and throughout her period of production, she pursued her artistic work with great passion³ and left behind a memory imbued with consciousness.
Left: Melike Abasıyanık Kurtiç, Untitled, Undated, Ceramic, glazes, 20 x 21 x 19 cm, 20 x 21 x 15 cm. Courtesy of the Abasıyanık Family and Galeri Nev
Right: Melike Abasıyanık Kurtiç, Untitled, Undated, Double sided arrangement; collage of seaweed on rice paper, plexiglass, 4 parts, 104 x 177 x 4 cm. Courtesy of the Abasıyanık Family and Galeri Nev
Art history is full of stories of artists who only came to prominence toward the end of their lives or after their deaths. Louise Bourgeois and Hilma af Klint, for instance. Once again, the retrospective held after Melike Abasıyanık Kurtiç’s death in 2021 showed us that a powerful body of work and a powerful artist can never remain submerged forever. And yet, the sentence she uttered in 2012, “thank you very much for taking an interest in my work,” still feels just as sad to me today as it did then.
Upon a Rock, I Grew, Exhibition view. Photo: Zeynep Fırat
Following the retrospective held in 2024 at the Erimtan Museum of Archaeology and Art, curated by Deniz Artun, the group exhibition titled Upon a Rock, I Grew, conceived by Galerist and Galeri Nev around Melike Abasıyanık Kurtiç, introduced one of the most compelling ways of looking at her work: inviting contemporary artists to enter into dialogue with an artist who is no longer alive and with her practice. In this exhibition, works by Burcu Yağcıoğlu, Zeynep Kayan, Masao Yamamoto, Deniz Aktaş, Ece Bal, Gökhun Baltacı, Thiago Rocha Pitta, Elif Uras, Anıl Saldıran, Johanna Seidel and İlhan Berk, who, like Kurtiç, is no longer alive, resonate with Melike Abasıyanık Kurtiç’s works and give rise to multiple perspectives. Equally meaningful is the presence, at the entrance to the exhibition, of a video composed of interviews conducted with the artist’s friends for her retrospective, offering visitors who may not yet be familiar with her work an opportunity to get to know her more closely. The video is, indeed, a remarkable record of memory. The generous and deeply engaging recollections of the artist shared by figures such as Candeğer Furtun, Süleyman Saim Tekcan and Jale Erzen, who knew her well, are especially moving.
Upon a Rock, I Grew, Exhibition view. Photo: Zeynep Fırat
It is striking how Galerist situates its group exhibitions on an intellectual ground that also carries a literary depth. Two highly sophisticated exhibitions realised at the gallery by Károly Aliotti offer some of the most compelling examples of this approach. The selected works, the relationalities established among them, and the exhibition’s poetic title, drawn from a line by İlhan Berk that also appears in the show, are all significant within this framework. Along the gallery corridor, the interweaving of İlhan Berk’s nude drawings and notes with Melike Abasıyanık Kurtiç’s spiky sea urchin drawings constitutes a powerful exhibition gesture. Upon entering the gallery, Elif Uras’s site specific installation titled Tepeler, produced especially for this exhibition, is equally meaningful in terms of foregrounding a form. Each of the eleven elements of this work takes as its point of departure the fundamental form of Melike Abasıyanık’s ceramics, the vertically rising sphere. It is hardly surprising that Elif Uras, a contemporary artist who interprets historical memory through a certain critical distance, would capture the principal formal vein of Kurtiç’s ceramics when engaging with an artist from the past. The dotted surfaces of Tepeler, by contrast, stand in stark opposition to Melike Abasıyanık Kurtiç’s spikes and are particularly striking.
From left to right:
Johanna Seidel, Başka Bir Sokağın Işığı
Deniz Aktaş, Unknown Plant series, 2025, Plant based ink on paper, 67 x 49 cm (unframed)
Burcu Yağcıoğlu, Aynı Ateş, 2025, Charcoal, acrylic paint, watercolour and airbrush on paper, 121 x 152 cm. Courtesy of Burcu Yağcıoğlu and Galerist
One of the most compelling works in the exhibition is Johanna Seidel’s painting titled Başka Bir Sokağın Işığı. In this work, the artist begins from a hypothetical premise and offers a speculative response to the question, “What would Melike Abasıyanık Kurtiç have looked like at her worktable?” What makes this naïvely inflected painting particularly intriguing is that it does not even attempt to imitate or represent the artist or the objects associated with her practice. Seidel, in effect, makes visible the distance she maintains from the artist she addresses, and it is precisely this distance that lends the work its strength. The yellow tone employed in this painting can also be traced in Burcu Yağcıoğlu’s work titled Aynı Ateş, in Deniz Aktaş’s photographic studies of thorns, in Gökhun Baltacı’s pastel depicting a found moment on water, in Melike Abasıyanık Kurtiç’s glazed ceramics, and, without doubt, in one of her major bodies of work produced while she was living in Portugal, the Güneşin Hareketleri series. Filling an entire wall in the main hall, this work, with all of its tactile layers on rice paper, possesses a truly captivating aura.
From left to right:
Gökhun Baltacı, Untitled, 2024, Oil pastel on pastel paper, 120 x 160 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galeri Nev
Zeynep Kayan, Bütün Gün Ağaçlarda / Kabuk 7, 2026, Archival pigment print, 21 x 18,5 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galeri Zilberman
Masao Yamamoto, A Box of Ku #0548, undated, Silver gelatin print, 18 x 20 cm, Ed. 40
The sea urchins, seaweed, thorns and seeds that Melike Abasıyanık Kurtiç worked on tirelessly, with both deep passion and the curiosity of a scientist, as well as the movements of the sun and the sea, make it unmistakably clear that the entire vein of her artistic practice is rooted in nature. While it is certainly possible to situate this body of work within the artistic movements of the 1970s, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that she was a solitary artist, driven by a pursuit that lay far beyond calculations of visibility. In the exhibition, Zeynep Kayan’s photographic series, in which tree bark and skin merge, titled after Marguerite Duras’s story Bütün Günler Ağaçlarda (Des Journées Entières Dans les Arbres), points precisely to this profound passion for nature. Here, tree bark appears almost as an object of desire. For Melike Abasıyanık Kurtiç, too, looking at all those objects, above all sea urchins, was most likely a source of deep pleasure in itself. Having lived in Denmark, Germany, Greece, Hungary and Portugal⁴, and having encountered the natural environments of different geographies until the mid 1990s, the images of nature and its endless capacity to astonish must have carried a particular significance for her. The shores of Çeşme, which served as the central site for the sea urchins and seaweed she returned to again and again, seem to have functioned as a vast field of study. All these acts of tracking within nature do not take place solely in the mind, but inevitably also implicate the artist’s bodily presence and movement. Much like Zeynep Kayan’s practice, Burcu Yağcıoğlu’s Hortimen series addresses the figure of a body entwined with nature. In the Hortimen installation, which draws on a book published by the Royal Horticultural Society and focuses on men engaged in gardening, the artist presents us with plant humans. Humanity’s reckoning with nature is so primordial that, in the effort to comprehend and make sense of the world, artists’ affective engagements with it are just as ancient.
Final step! In Masao Yamamoto’s small black and white photograph titled Bir Kutu Ku, a woman is seen climbing a rock. We see her from behind, almost voyeuristically, as observers. The exhibition Upon a Rock, I Grew comes to an end with this gestural image. It can be said that, without imposing anything on its visitors, the exhibition invites them to make discoveries and to form mental associations within a world of images that is not easily grasped and not immediately transparent. Moving through this constellation of images, which, like Melike Abasıyanık Kurtiç’s ceramics, remains inward looking and unassertive, offers a sense of intellectual fulfilment.
Yorumlar