Document Type
Exhibition/Gallery Showing
Publication Date
Spring 12-29-2020
Publication Title
Dimensional Presence: Serdar Arat
Department
Art and Design
College/School
College of Humanities and Fine Arts
Abstract
This catalog was produced on the occasion of the exhibition "Dimensional Presence: Serdar Arat" presented in The Clara M. Eagle Gallery from November 15, 2018 to February 7, 2019.
Serdar Arat is an artist from Istanbul, Turkey who has been living and working in New York since 1980. He received his M.F.A. in Painting at the State University of New York in Albany in 1984. His first solo exhibition was held in New York in 1986. Since then, he has presented many national and international solo- exhibitions and has participated in numerous group exhibitions in various cities across the US and abroad.
Arat’s passion for creating is present in his conversations and this sentiment surrounds the viewer as they investigate each work on view in the gallery. Serdar Arat conceives each piece of art separately and states that “individual pieces that pose similar challenges ultimately produce a series of works. I tend to work on several of these series simultaneously and sometimes over decades.” In his dynamic sculptural work, Fallen, a twenty- six-foot-long meandering sculptural installation on a raised platform, Arat has presented “a landscape strewn with over a hundred forms and fragments, in mixed media including cast bronze, copper, and ceramic. A life-time’s insistence on subdued and suggested three dimensionality in painting is thrown wide open in this piece with the explosion of sculptural forms coming straight out of the metaphorical imagery of my earlier paintings and works on paper. These are the same vents, sirens, tubes, wings, bones, and other fragments. Part organic and part mechanical, all fallen and abandoned, their prophecies and warnings ignored, innocence and idealism shattered, and grace and hope... barely recovered through the process of art.”
Recommended Citation
Martin, T. Michael, "Dimensional Presence: Serdar Arat" (2020). Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity. 154.
https://digitalcommons.murraystate.edu/faculty/154
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Included in
Art Practice Commons, Ceramic Arts Commons, Fine Arts Commons, Painting Commons, Sculpture Commons
Comments
Serdar Arat mentions that, “drawing is the closest we ever get to the immediacy of a thought in Art.” He continues that, “before it is “realized, a thought is a flash of imagination. It is inspiring, exciting, and motivating precisely because it is incomplete-unrealized. Some drawings may reflect the process of development of an initial thought into an idea for a complex artwork. All good drawings though, carry the freshest traces of an inspiring thought and the original flash of imagination.” Many artists, as well as myself, can relate to Arat’s thoughts about drawing’s importance to their creative process.