Who is Nezir Korkmaz (1954 -Bitlis)
I was born on February 27, 1954 in Bitlis- Hizan-Hirit (now Çökekyazı), a tiny village lost in the mountains in eastern Turkey. I had never seen a car in my life before the age of 7. In my village where there was no school, no pencils, no paper and where everyone was illiterate, I started drawing at the age I started walking, with only charcoal and my infinite curiosity as tools.
Later, we moved to Tatvan with my family where I spent my adolescence and did most of my apprenticeship in the field of art. Tatvan, a beautiful city surrounded by high mountains and the majestic Lake Van. Over time, this lake became my main source of inspiration whose blue floods my paintings.
Art Philosophy
Since the invention of the first tool by man a very long time ago, Man has never stopped developing the technology of his predecessors. Modern household objects and countless work tools that invade our daily lives. The television we watch, the telephone that carries our voice thousands of kilometers, the electricity that transforms night into day, sometimes a dental prosthesis, a battery placed under our skin, the eye of a dead stranger installed in the eye socket that gives us back our sight. Automobiles, boats, planes, instruments of war, of space, our interplanetary travels, bombs of all kinds, atomic, nuclear, biological. Skyscrapers, computers, industrial and military research centers, robots, not to mention the tens of thousands of factories necessary for their manufacture and, to manage all this, millions of human brains in perpetual activity.
I do not create robots that look like men but men who look like robots.
It is time to take the subject in hand, a new reference, that of a parallel and artificial life made by Man piece by piece: “Man and technology, continuous and irreversible.
In my opinion, our inventions have become our sixth sense, our third hands and feet, our wings, our eyes, our brains for specific tasks, we have now become inseparable.
Behind my portraits, I hide a multitude of information and life in all its facets.
"Man, Technology, Nature" in a single concept. Without a dividing line, like the birth of a "Biomechanical" being, of a Hybrid being.
I had to change the same face sometimes more than 20 times. I wanted to create a new face. A Man with all his cultural and technological heritage. A Man with his feelings of insecurity, his joys, and his fears that would symbolize our progress, but also the inevitable consequences linked to this modernization sometimes too advanced and often negative on the fragile balance of our dear nature. He has everyone around him, but no one with him. He has every reason to be afraid, because he is the one who sees everything, hears everything, knows everything. With all the weight of his time on his shoulder, a Man - machine that breathes, but who remains above all a Man.
Known to have opened his first exhibition at the age of 16 while still a high school student, Nezir Korkmaz's "Passengers" painting, one of the masterpieces of his philosophy of life and artistic adventure, was awarded a gold medal by the Royal Academy of Belgium when he was 18. Korkmaz, whose works are mostly recorded as award-winning works, has also received cups and awards for his contributions to art.
Korkmaz, who has numerous national and international exhibitions, continues his art life in his studios in Paris and Istanbul.
View all posts
