It can be visited free of charge at Casa Botter every day except Mondays between 10:00 and 19:00 between September 18, 2024 and January 12, 2025.
The third in the “Botter Exhibitions” series curated by Levent Çalıkoğlu at Casa Botter, Istanbul’s first art nouveau structure, the “Solo Botter: Komet” exhibition has opened to visitors. The opening of the exhibition was held on Tuesday, September 17, with the participation of figures from the worlds of art, politics, business and media, including Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IMM) Deputy Secretary General Mahir Polat, IMM Cultural Heritage Department Head Oktay Özel, IMM Culture Department Head T. Volkan Aslan, Bedri Baykam, İnci Aksoy, Canan Tolon, Levent Erden, Osmantan Erkır.
The “Solo Botter: Komet” exhibition, which offers a special selection from the early works of Gürkan Coşkun, or Komet, who we lost in 2022, to his white-background conceptual minimalist paintings called “alto modern” in the 1960s, can be visited free of charge at Casa Botter between September 18, 2024 and January 12, 2025.
Who is Komet (Gürkan Coşkun)
Komet, one of the most important representatives of the critical-political figure painting approach that took shape after 1970, is an extraordinary painter who interweaves reality and imagination, seriousness and irregularity, melancholy and absurdity, mystery and a poetic universe. An interdisciplinary personality who brings painting closer to literature, poetry and philosophy, who criticizes the rules and patterns of modern life not only on canvas but also in different areas of expression of contemporary art such as video, installation and performance, and who tries to break the established definition of artist of his period... The artist, who depicts crowded figure groups that remind us of migration and individual-power relations in his early paintings, also creates the atmosphere of his paintings loaded with dream images that first come to mind when "Comet painting" is mentioned, in these years. In Paris, where he went with a state scholarship in 1971, he discovered the early Italian Renaissance painters, whom he saw as a source he would love and refer to again and again throughout his life. The figures in his paintings represent both anyone and no one, like heroes in fairy tales or legends, within an uncertain plot. Bureaucrat-type men, modern-looking women, and cute creatures sometimes exist in front of a forest landscape and sometimes in a deserted section of nature far from civilization. Time seems to have stopped, the past and the future have started to flow within the same composition and plot.
Source: https://t24.com.tr/video/solo-botter-komet-sergisi-casa-botter-de-ziyarete-acildi,61322
About Casa Botter (Botter Apartment)
Originally named Maison Botter (Casa Botter), Botter Apartment was built for Jean Botter, the official tailor and fashion designer of the palace during the reign of Abdulhamid II. Known as the first fashion house in Istanbul and home to the “Botter Fashion House” that shaped the fashion of the period, Botter Apartment was designed by Italian Architect Raimondo D’Aronco between 1900-1901; it took its place in the city’s memory as the first structure where the art nouveau movement was implemented in Istanbul. The art nouveau movement, which was effective in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and spread from England to Central Europe as a result of political and economic developments, was the expression of a style nourished by different sources. The movement, which developed an aesthetic that was compatible with the fluidity of nature with asymmetry, curvature, linearity, folds and bends, also influenced Istanbul's civil architecture. The facade of Botter Apartment, where D'Aronco synthesized the Viennese School with French-Belgian influences, also reflects the general characteristics of this movement.
Botter Apartment, which opened its doors in 2023 as "Casa Botter Art and Design Center" in the first phase of the restoration works carried out by İBB Miras, has an exhibition hall on the ground floor and work areas that keep the pulse of the 100th Anniversary of the Republic on the first floor.