Bahar Artan Oskay 'The Presence Of Absence' Print Available
Artist: Bahar Artan Oskay
Title: The Presence Of Absence
Medium: Wall Sculpture
Size: 24.2 x 20.5 cm
Edition: 150
Prices: $900
Istanbul-born Bahar Artan Oskay (1984) turns destruction into design. Armed with degrees from Yeditepe and Yıldız Technical Universities culminating in a Ph.D. she began by re-styling modern masters, inserting Mondrian grids and Matisse cut-outs into pop-culture contexts to test how fame warps seeing. Frustrated by her own polished surfaces, she literalized Picasso’s maxim that “every act of creation is first an act of destruction.” Oskay now saws dry figurative canvases into loose squares, then re-assembles the shards into swirling, pixel-like abstractions where brush-strokes meet saw-blade scars. The process is half chess, half chance: she never knows which color relationships will survive the shuffle, so each final panel records a tense truce between control and chaos.
The resulting wall works shown in solo and group exhibitions across Turkey and Japan read as slow-motion explosions of her earlier style, simultaneously erasing and preserving personal art history. By grafting fragments above the picture plane, she also toys with sculptural depth, letting shadows complete the composition as daylight shifts. When she isn’t cutting canvases, Oskay teaches and co-directs the Fine Arts program at Yeditepe, mentoring the next generation to question, cut and rebuild whatever tradition they inherit.
