Ahmet Oran's first solo exhibition at the bechter kastowsky gallery presents new, partly large-format paintings by the Turkish-Austrian artist, who was born in 1957.
Ahmet Oran's paintings are characterised by their "layer by layer" process, which enables a direct understanding of the working process and thus places the focus on the creation of the image. Graphic elements are combined with painterly gestures and an emphasis on two-dimensionality. The large-format, rectangular canvases are worked over their entire surface and thus seem to show a section of an infinitely expanding arrangement of surfaces, lines and traces.
One part of the exhibition consists of Ahmet Oran's well-known paintings, in which he reveals the underlying layers of paint by drawing lines with a palette knife and pieces of wood. The lines, which alternate between broad and fine and run diagonally through the picture, are laid out like a grid over the entire picture surface and generate a spatial illusion through their varying widths. The seemingly expressive gesture of the line drawn with the palette knife breaks with the decelerated speed of its movement: With the utmost deliberation, the lines seem to spread across the canvas through their twists and turns. This gives the impression that one can follow the production of the work step by step. The colours (white and off-white) additionally support the impression of deliberate restraint of any shrill, expressive painting.
In addition to these two-colour, screened pictures, Ahmet Oran is showing new monochrome works in which the structure in the picture is not created by a contrast of colour values, but by a relief-like structure of the monochrome material. Like thin rods that seem to have been placed on the canvas at random, the entire surface is populated by equally long, sculpturally protruding lines that are positioned at different angles to each other and thus divide the painting ground into various surfaces.
