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Curator İpek Yeğinsü examines the themes and motifs of Murat Cengiz’s work and the context in which it was made:

 

Cree, Self Portrait and Undefinable by Murat Cengiz belong to his ongoing “Human-Island” series. As if suddenly appearing before our eyes in the middle of nowhere, these fantastic buildings do not exactly conform to any historical period or architectural style, in spite of the historical elements they contain. The artist’s mastery in using the line for building the form in layers adds an additional depth, almost a third dimension to the images. Within the framework of Cengiz’s ongoing artistic research in a diverse range of graphic attitudes, the crucial element that renders these series particular is that each building is possible to be read as an individual, and thus the series become a series of portraits.

 

As an individual’s identity is composed of many psychological, cultural, and even historical elements oscillating between his past and future and being redefined countless times at a perceptual level, each one of Cengiz’s works have a multi-layered, multi-dimensional, multi- chronological identity. These works, also establishing a dialogue with issues such as a building’s personality or architectural identity, are presented in three radically different exhibition techniques, to emphasize the experimental approach in Cengiz’s quests; the exhibition method determined for each artwork was chosen in a way to underline the character of that specific work.

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Murat Cengiz (www.muratcengiz.com) is a multi-faceted visual artist working on illustration, design, painting, sculpting, digital sculpting, 3D printing  and game design. He holds a B.A. and an M.A. degree in Graphic Design from Dokuz Eylül University Fine Arts faculty. He worked as a Field researcher, Restitution Artist as a member of the Anadolu University, Olympos (Lycia) Archaeology Team in 2005-2006, then Creative director and field researcher at Gallipoli Research Centre in 2006-2007. In 2011 he worked for the International Biennial of Izmir as a founding member and creative Director. Between 2012 - 2014 he worked as the founding member of OYUNDER (Association of Game Designers and Producers of Turkey), and also moonlighted at a comics magazine. The artist traveled extensively across East Asia painting murals, working on product photography. Cengiz had a solo  art exhibition in Torino, Italy and participated to group exhibitions in Istanbul. Currently he works and lives in Berne, Switzerland.