| Using fluorescent paint and fabric to explore color, luminosity, movement, and sculptural space, Turkish artist Gulay Alpay captures the energy of the life—from the people she meets to the places she travels. |  |
Abraham Lubelski on Gulay Alpay’s 3D Project Room Installation.
Using fluorescent paint and fabric to explore color, luminosity, movement, and sculptural space, Turkish artist Gulay Alpay captures the energy of the life—from the people she meets to the places she travels. With raw energy and provocation Alpay’s work explores painting’s potential. Her installations, paintings, and interactive environments occupy a domain between a romantic and a conceptual art form in which a deep, psychological experience is formed. In her works broad brush strokes and graffiti-esque lines, in acidic and delicate colors, dash across an epic surface inviting the viewer inside.
Alpay’s 3D Project Room Installation is a world within a world. Each of these “worlds” are created with a variety of mediums. Alpay has developed a reputation for epic poetic works that display both delicacy and fragility, revealing a deep respect for something fundamental, primal, and indigenous.
Alpay began the invocative piece in Istanbul, completing the creative process in front of a live audience at the gallery space in New York. World famous designer Emre Erturk collaborated with Alpay on the opening night during the performance. The performance/live installation re-creates the artist’s studio within a gallery context, allowing both the artist and the viewer to exist inside, and outside the picture—therefore becoming a part of the artist’s state of creation. In this sense her action is both political and aesthetic—and in its action, aims to transform existing language and its effects.
Alpay continues to explore the idea of transforming yourself and your environment through ritual and the creative act. To her, each artistic act—from layering paint on the silk and her own body, to building an environment of paintings and drawings—are all opportunities for purification, love, and rebirth. At her core she is still investigating the alternative semantics of the artistic body—those suppressed by layers of Western rationalism. Presenting this scenario as a premeditated action in a clinically white and a typically cold space, she challenges both what is acceptable in an art venue, as well as the boundaries of art. In this way the exhibition and performance questions her position as subject/object and the possibility of transcending this. 3D Project Room Installation offers us as viewers the opportunity to investigate relations—throwing performance art back into a pool of nebulous ideas and issues—and the categorization of the work, which fluctuates from performance to living sculpture and live installation, to looped-video art-like action.
Demanding that viewers leave at the door notions of what painting should be, Alpay allows them the freedom to let feelings be their guide. Her paintings and sketches straddle the line between representation and abstraction. The artist’s strength lies within this fluid movement between genres and categories. Caught between description and dreamlike states, the observed and the imagined, Alpay’s work transforms the natural world into poetic visions and fantasy, while still utilizing symbolic elements to convey psychological ideas and emphasize the “freedom” of art from traditional culture.
While preserving both Expressionist influences, Alpay’s paintings offer a new and unique contribution to the art and culture of her times. Her method is contemplative, meditative, and indulgent. The paradoxes in Alpay’s work lie in the blurring of boundaries between interior and exterior, self and others, the physical and spiritual. This is a mysterious form of creation, in which art seems to return to its ancestral shamanic role. Reminiscent of a dream voyage to another place, Alpay’s works are deeply personal, evoking her own subconsciousness, while revealing universal truths about the journey and celebration of life.
