Gün, 1956-2014

The artist known as Gün is a graduate of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and holds a doctorate in painting and art history. He researched the life and works of Sigmund Freud in 1980. In 1982, he studied biochemistry, biophysics, and astronomy at Vienna University. He worked in Berlin courtesy of a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) grant from 1986-1987.

Freudian influences and a surrealistic approach are evident in Gün’s work, which probes the unconscious. Treaty of Kadesh, by contrast, takes history, philosophy, literature, and music as its main sources of inspiration. The Kadesh treaty is the first known example of a written peace treaty in history. Part of the text ofthe original inscribed on a baked clay tablet, now in the İstanbul Archaeological Museum, was Gün’s inspiration for this painting. He takes a conceptual approach towards painting, reducing his inner world to broken, intersecting lines of color in the midst of white voids. After 1985, he turned his attentions to Abstract Expressionism.

Although there is some evidence of a coherent line of development in Gün’s work, his most recent images show a clear break with the past in terms of their composition, values, outlook, and formal considerations. These differences suggest that Gün is trying to make a fresh start and to achieve a new freedom by creating works that are stripped of conceptual baggage and oblivious to the past.