Overview
Ahmet Oran
Photo © Robert Kastowsky

"The pictorial material, the paint, is piled up on the pictorial surface, moved back and forth and then removed again. My painting consists of the remaining traces of the material."

Ahmet Oran's paintings open windows, they expose and bring the hidden to the surface. With a painterly gesture, Oran places the oil paint on his picture support and constructs an abstract painting, which he then: covers up! Another layer of paint is placed on this intrinsically painterly support and covers it almost completely, were it not for the traces that the artist places in the still damp veil in an act of spontaneous movement. With the help of brushes and squeegees, Ahmet Oran thus exposes the lower layers and allows a glimpse of the abstraction that was initially created. The scratching in leads to the final product of the painting. Here, the classical panel painting is turned into the opposite. It is not paint applied with a brush that creates a picture, but the removal of the oil paint that leads to completion. This last step is strongly reminiscent of graphic elements, since it is an unconscious direct drawing on a still wet painting surface.

 

Born in Turkey in 1957, Ahmet Oran knows how to combine painting and drawing in his works. His technique is based on a clear mastery of the medium, because the paintings require the perfect moment to reveal their traces. Too early: the veil laid over the abstract primer literally loses its power and flows into itself, too late: the drawn strokes no longer become free traces of drawing, the material dries and prevents any spontaneity.

Works
Biography
Photo © Tobias Rehbock
Photo © Tobias Rehbock

Ahmet Oran lives and works in İstanbul, Bodrum and Vienna

born 1957 in Çanakkale, Turkey

 

1977 – 1980 studies of painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul with Adnan Çoker

1980 – 1985 studies of painting, glass painting, graphic arts  with Carl Unger and afterwards

1985 – 1987 in the master class of Adolf Frohner at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna

 

PUBLICATIONS (selection)

 

exhibition catalog Ahmet Oran. New Gallery of the City of Linz, 1999.

exhibition catalog Ahmet Oran. Rampa İstanbul, 2010.

 

Ahmet Oran – Paintings and Works on Paper. Rampa İstanbul, Birkhäuser Basel, 2014:

 

„This collection from the oeuvre of Ahmet Oran is not a

complete survey of the artist’s work over the last 25 years.

Instead it represents a fragmentary assemblage of

individual work groups that crystallized as I viewed the

material at my disposal. Together Ahmet Oran, Florian

Steininger and I defined the work groups and selected the

pieces presented here. In the process, we made the

important decision to arrange the material in six thematic

ensembles. The answer to the question of where a documentation

of the oeuvre of Ahmet Oran should begin

or end in this instance derives from an attempt to allot the

greatest possible space to his ongoing cycle of works from

recent years. The chronology of the book’s illustrations

thus runs from present to past, ending with the painterly

prints, which even today continue to play a significant

role in Ahmet Oran’s oeuvre. To enable the interested reader

to grasp the timeline of the individual pictures and work

groups, corresponding illustrations appear on pages 316 to

319. In contrast to the book’s chronology, the visual

chronology runs from the past to the here and now. This

sequencing of the miniature illustrations not only offers a

complete overview of all the works reproduced in the

book, it also facilitates recognition of the evolution of the

images within particular intervals of time.“

 

Walter Bohatsch

Exhibitions