Katabasis sergisinden
  • "In Botero, we see figures inflated like balloons that evoke a sense of lightness, while in Erkan, the figures are dense and heavy like lead. Their commonality lies in their fullness of questions, refusing to settle where you want them to."
  • - From the article 'Two Opposing Visual Languages'

  • Necmiye Alpay

Writer, Linguist, Translator
Radikal, July 15, 2010
Katabasis sergisinden
  • "In his series of paintings titled "Body and Stone," Nurettin Erkan emphasizes contrasts such as internal-external, existence-non existence and impermanence-permanence as well as playing with the viewer's perception of reality by creating a feeling of timelessness, emptying the objects and bodies and intertwining a new web of meanings over their new compositions. The artist carries the bodies, which he has adorned with metaphoric symbols of his own, from a historical perspective up until our present day and exhibits how he emulates a different form and meaning by emptying the form with the body metaphor."
  • - From the article 'BODY AND STONE IN NURETTIN ERKAN'S PAINTINGS'

  • Lütfiye Bozdağ
Art critic, academician
May 2010, Istanbul
Katabasis sergisinden
  • "It is not the surface beauty of pleasure and happiness, but a deeper beauty we cannot easily name. Perhaps it is a terrible beauty (as the Irish poet W. B. Yeats called it), a passing glimpse of courage and endurance, of resistance and survival."
  • - From the article 'OF BODIES AND TIME AND MELANCHOLY'

  • Vinay Dharwadker
Writer, poet, translator, academician
University of Wisconsin–Madison, December 26, 2013, US
Katabasis sergisinden
  • " Certainly a beauty, framed within the rectangle of a canvas, that is tinged with sorrow and melancholy. These paintings made me think yesterday of a short poem by the contemporary Indian woman poet, Gagan Gill, which she wrote in Hindi when she was a young woman in Delhi, and which I translate as follows:

          Sorrow in Happiness

        The sea has the sorrow of the wounded sea-turtle
        The tree-trunk has the sorrow of the dying root
        The storm has the sorrow of the man on the verge of defeat

        Who has the sorrow that lies in happiness?"
  • - From the article 'OF BODIES AND TIME AND MELANCHOLY'

  • Vinay Dharwadker
Writer, poet, translator, academician
University of Wisconsin–Madison, December 26, 2013, US
Katabasis sergisinden
  • "Time stands still on Nurettin Erkan's canvases, and yet nothing is ever still, everything is in motion. The women, faceless, often without eyes and mouths, without the beauty of a woman's head of hair, without a gaze to return my gaze, are only in media res. The motionlessness is the pause of a freeze-frame. To look at fifteen or twenty of these paintings in succession in one room is to feel the powerful upsurge of temporality, of a process very much in process, of a movement that moves us and sweeps us along. The succession of pictures on a wall is the illusion of a series or a sequence of moments, but time is both a question and a questioning. We are in the present and the paintings are present before us, but their time is also not our time, they transport us gently but firmly into another time and another place. We enter their time and it becomes ours."
  • - From the article 'OF BODIES AND TIME AND MELANCHOLY'

  • Vinay Dharwadker
Writer, poet, translator, academician
University of Wisconsin–Madison, December 26, 2013, US
Katabasis sergisinden
  • "In my opinion what confronts us here is a pictorial language that is guided by a desire to discover the basic structure that lies at the root of an infinite and invariable knowledge of the body."
  • - From the article 'THE PROCESS OF BEING AND ANONYMIZATION'

  • Levent Çalıkoğlu
Art critic, curator,Istanbul Modern director
The director of Istanbul Modern, 2003, Istanbul
Katabasis sergisinden
  • "My paintings, therefore, are not nude, nor naked because their skin is not the one seen under a fabric. They are paintings identified more with rocks, trying to structure towards an "I" further back in time." -Nurettin Erkan
  • - From the interview 'Interview by Scott Douglas Jacobsen'

  • Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Journalist
May 16, 2018, Madison, WI, US
Katabasis sergisinden
  • "The monopoly of art by colonial great capital and the functioning of museums, galleries, and other art institutions as tools of this capital normalize and promote mediocrity and evil in art, while always keeping the art of the ‘other’ suffocating."
  • - From the article 'While Idols Are Falling Dawn'

  • Nurettin Erkan
Painter, writer
GAZETE DUVAR, August 30, 2020, Madison, WI, US
Katabasis sergisinden
  • "European painting has developed parallel to the racist history of whiteness. The figure of Jesus bathed in light is continuously depicted with bright white skin, blonde hair, and colored eyes. Angels are also white in these paintings. For this reason, European museums have not been able to keep racism out until now. They exist as tools of world assimilation." -Nurettin Erkan
  • - From the interview 'We did not disappear because our memory resists'

  • Jinda Zekioğlu
Journalist
GAZETE DUVAR, Tuesday, March 24, 2020, GREECE
Katabasis sergisinden
  • "The control tower, guided by crows, can no longer chart a course for the future. They have long accepted that history has come to the end, and their gods have already died. Nothing is visible through their vizors anymore. The codes of the future are not in Zofia's bag. The codes of the future are in the bag tightly held in Tomek's lap, and we Kurds, like all the world's others, know very well what is in that bag."
  • - From the article 'Kurds, Tomek, and Kieslowski'

  • Nurettin Erkan
Painter, writer
GAZETE DUVAR, October 23, Friday 2020, Madison, WI, US
Katabasis sergisinden
  • "No people without a country or with a country that has been occupied and deeply scarred in their collective memory can create a country for themselves by disciplining their occupiers."
  • - From the article 'There is something else about 'Bir Başkadır' for us Kurds'

  • Nurettin Erkan
Painter, writer
GAZETE DUVAR, November 21, Saturday 2020, Madison, WI, US
Katabasis sergisinden
  • "As we run after the allure of life that is expanding and increasing in possibilities, the speed of time is accelerating. Perhaps the foreigner resides in the dilemma between the time of deafening noise, which becomes blunted as it speeds up, and the silence of sensitive stillness, insisting on continuing to alienate." -Nurettin Erkan
  • - From the interview 'ON THE ROAD'

  • Nida Nevra Savcilioglu
Art critic, editor, dramaturge
Okuyanus Press, December 11, 2002, Istanbul
Katabasis sergisinden
  • "Philosophically, the individual's existence problem converges with the artist's urge to create art and the essence of art’s expression. This essence, while searching for its own way of existing, finds itself in a journey. The journey is always about knowing "the other," the other person, the other time, or everything else... Perhaps always becoming "the other." Edip Cansever suddenly articulates this: "O image, why are you two?"... This is the nature of the foreigner's existence." -Nurettin Erkan
  • - From the interview 'ON THE ROAD'

  • Nida Nevra Savcılıoğlu
Art critic, editor, dramaturge
Okuyanus Press, December 11, 2002, Istanbul
Katabasis sergisinden
  • "It is not the surface beauty of pleasure and happiness, but a deeper beauty we cannot easily name. Perhaps it is a terrible beauty (as the Irish poet W. B. Yeats called it), a passing glimpse of courage and endurance, of resistance and survival."
  • - From the article 'OF BODIES AND TIME AND MELANCHOLY'

  • Vinay Dharwadker
Writer, poet, translator, academician
University of Wisconsin–Madison, December 26, 2013, US
Katabasis sergisinden
  • "Despite being female figures, they are all bald. In this regard, they evoke images of camps or some old asylums."
  • - From the article 'Two Opposing Visual Languages'

  • Necmiye ALPAY
Writer, Linguist, Translator
Radical Newspaper, July 15, 2010, Istanbul
Katabasis sergisinden
  • "My paintings are paintings of resistance. This is my first response but it is even more complex and wide. Thematizing the body is a philosophical position as well as a plastic-aesthetic alignment. The body has been undermined throughout time. They are active fields of resistance, deep assimilations, and of speechlessness."
  • - From the interview 'Interview by Scott Douglas Jacobsen'

  • Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Journalist
May 16, 2018, Madison, WI, US