Yusuf Taktak, 1951

Yusuf Taktak graduated from the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts, Department of Painting, in 1974 and attended the International Salzburg Summer Academy in the same year. He made a name for himself in the avant-garde movements of the 1980s. He produces novel and alternative works ranging from paintings to installations.

Creating an intertemporal network of images in his art, Yusuf Taktak reframes cultural discourses and practices through a painterly expression to construct his personal history. He is concerned with where cultural images and symbols come from and how they settle in our memory. Inspired by the tent, he depicts the triangle as a geometric form in his early works; he also incorporates the obelisk into his art as a main element, a form that for him refers to an intertemporal image in which reality and imagination fuse. While in some of his paintings the artist inscribes onto the surface of this image abstracted hieroglyphs that owe their existence to a different relationship between form and meaning, in other works, such as “While Dreaming”, he hides it among layers of color. In “While Dreaming” Taktak questions the multidimensionality of time, the state of consciousness between sleep and wakefulness, and the perception of reality on the vital plane.