1. society
2. unrest and war

Nihad Al Turk
Drawings on Paper
Nihad Al Turk
Drawings on Paper
2 April - 28 May, 2015
Ayyam Gallery Beirut
Beirut Tower, Zeitoune Street, Solidere, Beirut
T: +9611374450/51 [email protected] www.ayyamgallery.com
© 2015 Ayyam Gallery
Text: Maymanah Farhat
Design: Diala Sleem
All rights reserved
Escaping Signs
By Maymanah Farhat
Nihad Al Turk’s new series of drawings features portraits
of individuals and anonymous characters that appear to
float in the foreground of modest compositions. Set against
bare white backdrops, his subjects are depicted as cutouts,
isolated images rendered with illusions of volume and mass,
resembling sculptures. At first glance, the dimensions of the
paper seem to contain each figure, as the artist exaggerates
their physical proportions, focusing on stout heads that rest
on slender frames partially hidden from view. Although
fixed in ambiguous settings, the carefully rendered edges
of Al Turk’s characters define space in the absence of
environmental details—a technique that allows his figures
to supersede the surface of the paper as the main object of
the work, thus overpowering its material primacy.
Many of his unidentified protagonists are labeled The
Vanquished, those defeated or conquered. All of his subjects
are bruised and battered: their heads misshapen; their
features buried beneath the boulder-like mounds that form
foreheads, cheeks, and jaws. Deep cavities, or craters, serve
as eye sockets where white slivers hold pupils the size of
pellets; small and circular, they are also piercing. Within the
larger concept of Al Turk’s narrative-driven paintings, the
ability to see, albeit with obscured vision, has only recently
surfaced in his characters.
In previous works, monstrous creatures are shown without
eyes, ears, or mouths, and frequently missing limbs—
numb without senses but aware of their surroundings. The
Hunchback, for example—a 2008 painting Al Turk created
while living in Syria—shows a deformed protagonist with
a single, withered arm, his appendage-like neck stretched
to its furthest limit as if reaching for an approaching bird.
The small animal is also malformed and curious. The
demon-like character is presumably nude, his deep brown
body appearing as a solid form reminiscent of the shell of
a tree trunk. The anthropomorphic figure wears a beaded
necklace, the seven blue amulets of which represent the
number of members in Al Turk’s immediate family. Other
biographical references are made in similar compositions,
forming the visual vocabulary of an ongoing tale—the story
of man’s existential conflict through the experiences of the
artist. Such laden symbolism links his earlier self-portraits
to these latest works, although his cast of characters has
grown to include recognisable men, women, and children,
namely known martyrs of the Syrian conflict.
Formalistic traces of his paintings emerge in the new
series. Al Turk’s mythological bird, for example, is filled
with brilliant shades of blue, red, or green as she engages
personalities in contemplative exchanges, her seven feathers
indicating the presence of the artist. In Dialogue (2015), the
bird brushes against a bald man who is visibly skeptical of
the creature’s affection. Refusing to turn toward the sevenwinged animal, he glances at it from the corner of his eye,
cynical about the possible outcome of an exchange. The bird
is nearly the size of the figure’s head but is filled with a blue
and green checkerboard pattern, which distinguishes her
from the world of the vanquished. The design is adapted from
Al Turk’s early paintings in which the motif appears on the
tablecloth of brooding still lifes. The drawing’s title references
a 2007 painting that shows his hunchbacked double under
attack from the bird’s flock. A number of subsequent mixed
media canvases and sculptures are similarly titled and include
corresponding subject matter although the animal eventually
meets a different manifestation of the artist’s stand-in. Over
time, Al Turk’s self-portrait grew horns and became upright
and full-bodied: a self-assured, menacing anti-hero. A 2011
composition depicts a face-off between the opposing forces
of his paintings, the two sides of his own image as the
personification of a struggle between good and evil.
The artist’s works on paper follow a collection of paintings
that demonstrates the steady transformation of his approach
to figuration alongside the progression of autobiographical
subject matter. Al Turk’s painting style changed within a
year of his move to Lebanon in 2012. The spirit animals and
inanimate objects that establish the metaphoric content of
his compositions reappear in recent paintings, yet there is
a noticeable difference in their forms. In Apple (2014), his
amputated alter ego is depicted with a new casing. Small
circular motifs cover the burnt-red skin of his twisting body,
blue barnacles that replace the washes and scratches of prior
works. Positioned against a bright yellow background, he
balances an oversized apple, an item that signals everyday life
and often serves as an allegorical linchpin in his paintings.
Mirroring the rebirth of the protagonist within the enlivened
setting, the apple is composed of diagonal lines of various
colours and sizes. With the start of the uprising in Syria, the
psychological gravity of Al Turk’s canvases began to shift, and
in Beirut, took a dramatic turn. Given the artist’s preceding
canvases, how might we consider his drawings?
In an artist statement accompanying the series, Al Turk
explains how he embarked on his new work. As the war in
Syria intensified, he made preparatory sketches for paintings
that would explore its daily toll—what he describes as ‘the
pressure and pain’ of witnessing its mounting devastation.
After several unsuccessful trials on canvas, he decided to
plot his ‘anger and passion’ using a pencil and paper. The
physical proximity required in the act of drawing appealed
to the artist, as it allowed him to document the tension that
arises when attempting to create a pictorial representation
of psychological phenomena. In order to enter the psychic
spaces of wartime experience, the spatial and temporal
dimensions of his immediate reality had to be surpassed.
The conceptual lucidity of the artist’s works on paper is
not only derived from the stylisation of his figures but also
the formalism of drawing, namely the laborious process
of gradually building dimension by layering lines with
a ballpoint pen. For Al Turk, the reflexive expressiveness
of drawing provided an entry to this intuitive domain,
bringing to mind Leslie Jones’ observation that early
surrealist artists favoured the medium due to the ‘limitless
representational possibilities of the unconscious.’ 1By
simultaneously employing multiple hatching techniques,
the artist renders dense shadows that emphasise the fragile
state of his subjects, and contours their faces in order to
detail instances of light. Vigorous lines move across scattered
highlights, an effect that suggests an unending process of
disfiguration. Colour is added over areas where hatching is
sparse. Large stains form as pigments seep into the paper
encircling swollen eyes and covering injured hands.
Al Turk’s portraits of the war’s martyrs display the greatest
degree of realism within the series. The boy whose brutal
death under detention marked a turning point in the
uprising is easily identified in Hamza el Khatib (2015), his
pensive face resembling the school picture that was widely
circulated after the details of his torture were made public.
As he gestures the two-fingered victory sign in defiance of
his captors, Al Turk’s bird rests on his chubby, adolescent
finger. Three drawings titled Dilar, after the Kurdish
fighter Arin Mirkan, who performed a suicide mission
during a 2014 operation to free the northern Syrian town
of Kobani from ISIL control, serve as the central images of
this latest body of work. The young woman is depicted as
she is represented in news and social media with personal
photos that show her in army fatigues, her long hair pinned
back and covered with a simple scarf, a detail that frames
her face. In Al Turk’s drawings she is shown smiling and
content, and accompanied by the protective creature that
watches over him in his self-portraits. As the artist enters
this phase of his work, he makes sure to hold onto escaping
signs, chronicling his experiences in exile with the stories
of his compatriots.
1
Leslie Jones, Drawing Surrealism. (New York and London: Prestel Publishing, 2012).
Nihad Al Turk
(Syria, born 1972)
Informed by readings in literature, philosophy, and theory, many
of Nihad Al Turk’s deeply psychological compositions can be
read as allegorical self-portraits. Central to his work are thematic
explorations of the endurance of man amidst the power struggles of
good and evil—an existentialist question that has engrossed the artist
for some time. Al Turk’s regular cast of imperfect creatures, mythical
demons, still lifes, and botanical elements serve as the symbolic
outcasts, anti-heroes, and rebels of a harrowing narrative. Recently, he
has set aside the dark palette of his earlier mixed-media paintings by
injecting vivid hues in the form of solid colour fields that accentuate
figures. This visible sense of optimism is juxtaposed with the quieting
of his protagonists through a physicality that is robust and no longer
disfigured as they finally escape the weight of their world.
Born in Aleppo, Syria in 1972, Nihad Al Turk lives and works in
Beirut. A self-taught artist, he began drawing at a young age and
pursued painting in his adolescence prior to launching his artistic
career in Syria in the late 1990s. Selected solo and group exhibitions
for the artist include Ayyam Gallery Al Quoz, Dubai (2014); Ayyam
Gallery DIFC, Dubai (2014); Ayyam Gallery London (2014); Ayyam
Gallery Beirut (2014; 2011); Ayyam Gallery Damascus (2009); the
Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Damascus (2009); Park
Avenue Armory, New York (2008); Mark Hachem Gallery, New York
(2008); Diyarbakir, Turkey (2005); and the Latakia Biennale (2003),
where he was awarded the Golden Prize.
The Vanquished
2015
Ink and acrylic on paper
65 x 75 cm
The Vanquished
2015
Ink and acrylic on paper
65 x 75 cm
The Vanquished
2015
Ink and acrylic on paper
65 x 75 cm
The Vanquished
2015
Ink and acrylic on paper
65 x 75 cm
The Vanquished
2015
Ink and acrylic on paper
65 x 75 cm
The Vanquished
2015
Ink and acrylic on paper
65 x 75 cm
The Vanquished
2015
Ink and acrylic on paper
65 x 75 cm
The Vanquished
2015
Ink and acrylic on paper
65 x 75 cm
The Vanquished
2015
Ink and acrylic on paper
65 x 75 cm
The Vanquished
2015
Ink and acrylic on paper
65 x 75 cm
The Vanquished
2015
Ink on paper
100 x 100 cm
The Vanquished
2015
Ink on paper
100 x 100 cm
The Vanquished
2015
Ink on paper
100 x 100 cm
The Vanquished
2015
Ink on paper
110 x 144 cm
The Vanquished
2015
Ink on paper
110 x 144 cm
The Vanquished
2015
Ink on paper
110 x 144 cm
The Vanquished
2015
Ink on paper
100 x 100 cm
The Vanquished
2015
Ink and acrylic on paper
109 x 109 cm
Desire
2015
Ink and acrylic on paper
70 x 70 cm
Desire
2015
Ink and acrylic on paper
70 x 70 cm
Rehana I
2015
Ink on paper
110 x 144 cm
Rehana II
2015
Ink on paper
100 x 100 cm
Martyr of Qamishlo
2015
Ink on paper
100 x 100 cm
Singer
2015
Ink on paper
100 x 100 cm
Naao
2015
Ink on paper
100 x 100 cm
Naao
2015
Ink on paper
110 x 144 cm
Dialogue
2015
Ink on paper
110 x 144 cm
Dilar I
2015
Ink on paper
110 x 144 cm
Dilar II
2015
Ink on paper
110 x 144 cm
Dilar III
2015
Ink on paper
110 x 144 cm
Hamza el Khatib
2015
Ink on paper
110 x 144 cm
Unruly Desire
2015
Ink on paper
110 x 144 cm
The Unknown
2015
Ink on paper
110 x 144 cm
Sara
2015
Ink on paper
110 x 144 cm
Enamored Fighter
2015
Ink on paper
110 x 144 cm
Ayyam Gallery
Founded in Damascus in 2006, Ayyam Gallery is
internationally recognised as a leading arts organisation in
the Middle East, representing a diverse roster of established
and emerging artists from the Arab world and Iran. Spaces
in Beirut, Dubai, and London, a widely respected publishing
division, and an associated non-profit arts programme have
furthered the gallery’s mission of promoting the dynamic
art of the region.
www.ayyamgallery.com