Kemal Seyhan (1960 - ) Click for Artist Information

Kemal Seyhan

Kemal Seyhan (1960 - )

Born in 1960 in Kayseri, after studying sociology at Boğaziçi University, he moved to Vienna where he studied art history and philosophy. The artist graduated from the Painting Department of the Vienna Academy of Applied Fine Arts and settled in Istanbul after spending more than 20 years in Vienna. The most distinctive feature of Seyhan's paintings are the spatula marks on a coordinate system consisting of thin transparent layers and the colors he uses. The artist creates a sense of depth on the canvas in the gaps between the layers he applies one on top of the other and determines these physical layers as a unique time-space. Seyhan's painting is a situation, a process, formed as a result of the piling up of time periods; it is time itself. Here, time, which is treated as an element that constitutes the painting, is not based on a general or linear time fiction beyond its historical-cultural determination. Seyhan, who searches for an inner time, from the work in the studio to the painting itself as a physical object, is influenced by nature and the physical environment in the colors he uses. The artist questions not a state of mind or emotion, but the painting itself. He lives and works in Istanbul.