Yüksel Arslan, 1933-2017

After beginning his university education in the Art History Department of Istanbul University, Arslan broke off his studies to pursue his interest in the visual arts and dedicate his attention to painting. With his critical and humorous style, Yüksel Arslan has a unique place amongst the significant figures of Turkey’s art history.

Throughout his entire artistic life, Arslan has distanced himself from the academic style of painting with his chosen topics of interest, materials used and style. In this way he has defined a distinctive position for himself. He has diversified his production practices with materials such as vegetable dyes on paper, bone meal, glue, ochre, honey, eggs, bone marrow, blood, soap, tobacco, tea and bricks. References from books he has read appear line by line in works referring to his own life experiences. Bodies are not just determined by situations in a story, they have a relationship with situations in the visual language Arslan creates in his universe of lines and thoughts. The human being is also at the center of the balance of power and systems and the value judgments created by the order of the world the artist experiences.

In “Arture 167, The Capital XVI, (Private Property)”, Yüksel Arslan visualizes the effects of capitalist production processes on society and individuals through symbolic language. Based on Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital”, the artist depicts hundreds of workers in a mass-production factory as standardized beings like the products they produce and industrialists as mere representations of their ideologies with coins in place of their faces.