When the art packaging is stripped away

Yağız Özgen’s Astronomy Picture of the Day series is presented in an unusual change of setting. Within the scope of the Hubble Space Telescope: New Views of the Universe exhibition held in collaboration with NASA and the Smithsonian Institution at the Everhart Museum through October 18, we interviewed the artist about his works displayed among natural history artifacts

Interview: Selin Çiftci

Yağız Özgen. Photo: Bradley Secker

I previously had the opportunity to see your Astronomy Picture of the Day series previously at DIANA in New York. Now, these works are being presented at the Everhart Museum in a scientific exhibition in which NASA and the Smithsonian Institution focus directly on telescope technologies. How do you think the shift of your works from a contemporary art gallery to an institutional museum exhibition focused on space science changes the way they are perceived? How do you interpret this change of setting?

The fact that my work has spilled beyond the institutional context of art into this realm has made me think about certain qualities of my practice that I had not really paid much attention to before. The Everhart Museum is a museum focused on the natural sciences and human history. Although these objects are, of course, highly significant from an anthropological perspective, they have no concern with being art. In this respect, seeing my works alongside the taxidermied animals, geological fossils, natural history objects, and telescope technologies in the building gave me an opportunity to think about what they are simply as paintings. So to speak, that “art packaging” was stripped away for a moment. Once the works were relieved of their “concern with being art,” I found myself faced with the question of what remained.

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Left: Yağız Özgen, Backdrop of Colorful Stars (1628 Colors), 2024, Acrylic on canvas, 240x192 cm (2 pieces: each 120x192 cm)

Right: Yağız Özgen, Dust and Structure in Pillars of Creation (982 Colors), 2024, Acrylic on canvas, 143,5 x 114,5 cm

In the APOD series specifically, on the one hand there are the telescopes that produce the images and the algorithms that visualize the raw data they collect; on the other, there is Yağız at the canvas, rendering the color codes one by one in acrylic, personally mixing and bagging the paints. As an artist, how would you describe this labor and the relationship you establish between high technology and the analog? Where do you position yourself within this process? Is Yağız here a painter, a translator, or, with reference to your work Painter, a (wall) painter?

I tend to see all of these as different stages along the same spectrum. Each is a techne that produces images at different resolutions. Each is an act of bringing something into the open. While I may appear to be doing different things under different identities when I put paints into plastic bags and label them in my studio, or when I prepare a wall surface in the gallery for painting, I am learning something about the world around us. Yağız is an artist, I suppose—an artist who sometimes paints, sometimes translates texts he likes, and sometimes makes paint by grinding pigments and binding them with polyvinyl acetate.

Speaking of Painter, perhaps we should also ask how you understand the hierarchy between the painter as artist and the (wall) painter. Where do these two identities converge or come into conflict in your practice?

It depends on what is meant by the hierarchy between the painter as artist and the (wall) painter. I can say that some (wall) painters interest me far more than many artists do. I have known many (wall) painters who apply paint to a wall with an extraordinary degree of precision compared to a painter. Some are extremely knowledgeable and obsessive about the texture of a surface that would go entirely unnoticed in the flow of everyday life, and about the interaction between the materials they use. I have even known (wall) painters who refuse to use the products of certain paint companies because they do not approve of the company’s ideology. And with all these details, they have much more fun in their own world than a painter does. Many painters do not even have a real world of their own, whereas the (wall) painter, by virtue of their work, comes into direct contact with the world in the midst of everyday life. I do not think there is a hierarchy between them, but when viewed in this way, perhaps the hierarchy could be reestablished in favor of the (wall) painter.

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Yağız Özgen, Study for "Reddish Emision From Knots of Material (1.392 Colors)", From left to right #1, #2 ve #3, Acrylic and lead pencil on acid-free paper, 76 × 39 cm

On the other hand, science and philosophy attempt to explain the world through certainties and verifiable propositions, producing meaning through them. Your practice similarly draws on research and is shaped by methodological work. How do you reconcile this with the subjective and ambiguous nature of art?

I am not a philosopher. But although science aims to be objective, scientific activity is not as objective as it appears from the outside. Science, of course, aims to present us with the causal structure of the world in the most objective way possible. Yet a scientist begins their activity with observable data—that is, with data that are highly subjective, specific only to the perceiving subject: they put a thermometer into water and “see” that the water boils at 100 degrees. Even if the inference they arrive at after a series of complex procedures is not subjective, what they see is at least as subjective as what a painter sees when looking at their surroundings. In this respect, as Russell puts it, the scientist finds themselves immersed in subjectivity while trying to be objective. Moreover, this applies not only to double-slit experiments, in which the observer affects the outcome of the experiment, but to all the natural sciences.

I think something similar can be said of art: It is not as subjective an activity as it appears from the outside either. Although not in the same way as scientific activity, I think art is also an activity that speaks about the world. Perhaps “speaks” is not quite the right word; it would be more accurate to say that it makes the world visible. Painters and musicians are translators who most powerfully transform the most complex propositions based on sensory data—paintings, maps, auditory images—into objective forms. In this respect, art, which constructs perceptible structures, cannot be an entirely subjective activity either. Still, because it emerges within a far more speculative field, it seems much easier to speak about the subjective dimension of an art object than about the subjective dimension of scientific activity.

I would like to ask about curiosity as well, since space and the sky are generally associated with it. The canvas is often understood as a means of expression that comes from inside, but what we have here is a form of creation that draws its nourishment from the world outside. What drives you? Where does curiosity sit within your artistic practice?

The canvas is not only a means of expression; it is also one of the many objects in the world. And it does not merely represent a spatial phenomenon—it is itself a spatial phenomenon. I think my curiosity has focused precisely on this point since the beginning of my artistic practice. How can layers of paint on various threads represent an object so far removed from them? I am genuinely amazed by this.

You have been exploring NASA’s archives for years for the APOD series. Now, much more advanced telescopes such as James Webb are showing us previously unseen depths of the universe, along with entirely new colors and details. As technology advances and humanity’s field of vision in the universe expands, how does this affect your color palette, your codes, and your production process? Is there a new stage toward which you see this series evolving in the coming period?

I am gradually moving away from this subject; some bodies of work, like everything else in an artist’s life, need to come to an end. The system does, of course, want us to repeat ourselves. But just as a subject does not suddenly enter an artist’s agenda, it does not suddenly disappear from it either. I follow developments in observational technologies as closely as I can, but I think the fundamental thing that is changing is not so much our understanding of the universe as the resolution of our images of it. Although instruments such as James Webb, compared with the Hubble Space Telescope, allow us to collect data in narrower infrared bands and on a grid containing more cells, what we are ultimately presented with is still a translation: a representation colorized according to a particular set of decisions. In other words, the resolution of the image increases, but our constitutive relationship with the reality it represents does not change very much—as long as the paradigm tied to a particular model of thought remains unchanged.

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Hubble Space Telescope: New Views of the Universe, Exhibition view, Everhart Museum

So, finally, what is the question about the universe or the world that you are most curious about, the one that occupies your mind the most right now?

I would say it is the disappearance, when I close my eyes, of the sensory data originating from the objects outside, and then the appearance of similar sensory data originating from the same objects when I open them again. While everything in the universe tends toward disintegration, partly as a result of entropy, objects preserve their identity over time, and our minds adapt to this continuity. We are finite, yet we maintain our continuity, at least for a certain period of time; just like other objects. I think this is one of the most interesting questions.

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Hubble Space Telescope: New Views of the Universe, Exhibition view, Everhart Museum