BE Contemporary Art Gallery is delighted to host Genco Gulan’s solo exhibition Beautiful Things, dealing with the tricky concern between conceptual art and beauty. The exhibition focus on Genco Gulan’s recent large-scale abstract paintings, figurative sculptures, experimental objects and ceramic works. Most of the works in the exhibition will appear before audience for the first time and will meet initially art lovers in Izmir.

 

After the concept of beauty has been associated with art for a long time, the serious rupture experienced in this relationship in the post-modern period is the basis of the exhibition Beautiful Things. Genco Gulan predicts that conceptual art and beauty will get closer again in the post-postmodern period after this separation of their ways. The contemporary artist Gulan tries new methods in Beautiful Things exhibition in order to recall conceptual art and perception of beauty together. He evaluates this approach, which revisits the definition of beauty in minds of the viewers, giving sometimes kitsch and sometimes minimal works, not as a final but a waiting space.

 

In the exhibition, Genco Gulan explores how concepts of “beauty and mind” can be used together; the sculpture titled “Both Beauty and Intelligence” (2014 & 2020) features Socrates’ head and Venus’ body together. Thus the artist disrupts the golden ratio in favor of intelligence by placing a disproportionately large head on the body to establish the emphasis on intelligence. In the portrait titled Janus (2021), referring to antique Janus sculptures that depict same-sex twins facing opposite each other, Genco Gulan breaks the rule and draws a man and a woman on the same plane. He passes over the hierarchy by adding an image of an ordinary (ectype) real young woman to a portrait of a Roman emperor made according to the book. The work “Paved with Golden” (2020) that refer to the construction and unearned income, is ironically painted gold, symbol of the beautiful and precious.