AHMET GÜNEŞTEKIN

Ahmet Güneştekin (born December 22, 1966 in Batman, Turkey) is a Kurdish visual artist, whose works span painting, conceptual art and constructions sculpture. For Güneştekin, art is a passion which has driven him since his childhood. He left the town of Batman for Istanbul in 1991, but had to wait several years before he found his own style at the beginning of the 2000s. He then abandoned the figurative to launch himself into a “narrative abstraction”.

This kind of production is loaded with the recollection of a vernacular art, the memory of motifs such as carpets, lamps, Ottoman copperware in which geometry is the leading force. Güneştekin uses a unique technique with an individual method and precision. After establishing a complex web of black acrylic paint, he fills each of the small spaces with a layer of oil paint, ranging from the light to the dark. Then, using a sort of pen with a rubber tip, he engraves into the paint, and writes as a calligrapher would on a book. He writes on his paintings by removing material, a principle which has more in common with sculpture than painting. Güneştekin’s works can be briefly described as the interpretation of the oral narratives, legends and mythology from Anatolian, Mesopotamian and Greek civilizations using free technique.

He creates optical and vibrant works, with the solar disc as one of his occurring motifs. The figurative way of expression is present in all his oeuvres, even though in an abstract stylized way. In all his contemporaneous works, the characters, symbols and scenes are taken out of ancient times, and these characters are symbolic, woven in symbolic tales about the essential questions of mankind.