Rahmi Aksungur, 1955

A student at the Department of Sculpture at the İstanbul State Academy of Fine Arts from 1973 to 1979, Rahmi Aksungur studied under Ali Teoman Germaner, Özer Kabaş, Altan Gürman, Şadi Çalık, Hüseyin Gezer, and Tamer Başoğlu.

Rahmi Aksungur’s approach to art is nourished by present-tense manifestations of the bizarre moments, images, and myths that have entrenched themselves in the memory of everyday life. Works in which the idea of design is purged of all decoration and is transformed into image are always dominated by a state of hybridity. Myths from the unconscious and everyday objects and living things that we might encounter at any moment in the present create a new visual alphabet in his art. A huge leaf, a strange being that is half-man and half-ship, hybrid bird-man apotropes... The artist creates a new sense of space by ridding sculpture of every excess, sometimes directly associating his work with the physical conditions of the setting in which it will be located, and sometimes taking advantage of the forces of attraction and repulsion inherent in those conditions. By doing so, he produces works that incite the spiritual and spatial perceptions of his viewers.

Making unrestricted use of whatever materials he feels may be called for in the design of his work since the 1980s, Aksungur regards sculpture as a problem of form. His method of working is based on modular units and their part/whole relationships and he has defined his primary course as one of “doing with less”. As an artist he makes the emotional and physical traits inherent in the materials he selects essential elements of his design in an attempt to show the viewer hybrid images in which material and design have become as one.