Dirimart, II is pleased to announce that the gallery will host the first solo exhibition of Albert Bitran, one of the important representatives of the abstract art movement that rose in Paris after World War II. The exhibition, which includes selected works of Bitran, who has maintained an important place in the movement since a young age with his unique style, produced between 1956 and 2013, goes beyond a chronological or style-based classification and focuses on the spatial sensitivity that the artist maintained throughout his career and the fluidity between the series he produced in different periods. Albert Bitran, who was born in Istanbul in 1931 as the child of a family of Sephardic origin, went to Paris in 1948 to study architecture and in a short time, he met many people from Turkey, including Mübin Orhon, Selim Turan, Avni Arbaş and Abidin Dino, who lived in Paris. He gets involved in the Montparnasse environment where artists exist. Following being a part of this environment, which he has idealized since his childhood, he establishes connections with names with different understandings of abstract painting such as Jesús Rafael Soto, Serge Poliakoff, Georges Koskas, Horia Damian, Wifredo Lam, Pierre Soulages and Hans Hartung, and takes part in group exhibitions.
In the Paris art environment in the post-war period, the elements of the painting were disassembled and dealt with one by one; It is on the agenda to reconsider volume, color, depth and form as separate elements. In this environment, Bitran started his adventure with geometric abstract works in the 1950s and continued with abstractions centered on the open air since 1956. The artist exhibited Paysage, L'Atelier, Les Doubles and Les Grandes Formes, which he developed over the years, in the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles exhibitions he took part in between 1952 and 1965, and the Salon de Mai exhibitions in which he took part uninterruptedly between 1956 and 1975. shows his signature series, such as [Large Shapes]. These are then followed by the Arcades series, which draws its source from childhood memories and depicts each as a passage. His abstract compositions, in which he explores the limbo between the perceptions of inside and outside with his Intérieur-Extérieur series, appear as his productions shaped on light, shadow and the relationship of space with them, in the later stages of his career.
Albert Bitran's Shadow Lands Sky Lands exhibition, held at Dirimart's Dolapdere, begins with a setup in which the artist invites the audience to his studio. The exhibition selection, which gives the impression that Bitran "personally selected" his works from different periods and styles, goes beyond the chronological order of his series and/or productions and invites the viewer to a time when the works in question were together in the artist's workshop in Paris.
Bitran's abstract paintings inspired by rural landscapes, which he started after living in the south of France, works that focus on the workshop itself as a space, compositions that problematise the concepts of inside/outside, and works that focus on variables such as the existence or disappearance of all spaces with light, are difficult to grasp at first glance. It gives the idea of unity. The artist's latest works in the exhibition evolve into works that can be interpreted as the dissolution of new planes that the series in question accumulate over time and create with their own dynamics.
Press release courtesy Dirimart.
Hacıahmet Mahallesi. Irmak Cad. 1-9
Dolapdere
Istanbul, 34435
Turkiye
www.dirimart.com
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