Deniz Aktaş, 1987

Born in 1987 in Diyarbakır, Deniz Aktaş graduated from Marmara University, Faculty of Fine Arts, Department of Painting, in 2010, after which he completed his master’s degree in the Program in Plastic Arts at Yeditepe University, Graduate School of Social Sciences. He is currently lives and works in Diyarbakır.

The artist produces paintings employing the techniques of ink pen on paper and digital print collage, and in which he often touches upon urban life through spaces. Working on the memories of spaces, the marks left by humans, or the impermanence of conditions that are built and rebuilt by human hands, Aktaş concentrates on themes of migration and memory, using urban components as his starting point.

In the drawing “Untitled,” where the city and the state of mind of the individual are both reduced to black and white, Aktaş takes the perspective from a room in shambles, with a window opening, containing only a chair discarded by the homeowners, toward apartment buildings where even greater destruction has taken place.