Butterfly Effect, a retrospective analysis of the works of Kadri Özayten and curated by Marcus Graf, is open at the Milli Reasürans Art Gallery until November 30, 2019.
Kadri Özayten, whose career started in the 1970s and continued until the early 2000s, was a masterful artist of who produced drawings, prints and paintings, as well as collages and videos. Butterfly Effect gives an insight into his work and his brilliant balancing of aesthetic and intellectual matters.
The show at Milli Reasürans follows his career in chronological order. In the 1970s, Özayten’s work was characterized by paintings and prints inspired from his life. In the 1980s, you can begin to see the influence of socio-political events in his work. The 1990s were the decade in which Özayten’s signature style became more concrete: butterflies, pebble stones, paper airplanes and camouflage textures became his personal icons of hope and anti-hope. It was during the 90s that he also began to focus on collages and time- and site-specific installations, as well as on pieces that were influenced by Fluxus and its process-oriented production methods. At the end of his career, he shifted back to painting and created a series of large pieces, in which he summarizes the artistic efforts of 40 years of intensive research and hard work