ISTANBUL.- Rahmi Aksungur is a highly influential sculptor and academician whose body of work has made a significant contribution to contemporary sculpture in Turkey. The Elgiz Museum presents Rahmi Aksungur’s latest exhibition EU 48/6/N on display in the temporary exhibition space from Tuesday November 1st to Saturday February 4th, 2017. The exhibition features two previously unseen works and 14 on loan from various private collections including the Elgiz, Yıldız Holding, Mustafa Balcı, Cağla Cabaoğlu, Haydar Halit Cenkeri, Kemal Servi and Cengiz Akıncı.

Rahmi Aksungur often draws inspiration for his artworks from the objects of daily life. Thus, In EU 48/6/N, we find the organic; some peppers, an apple, a leaf and a very large fish juxtaposed among Aksungur’s abstract and figurative sculptures.

In an recent interview with writer Jonathan Bastable, Aksungur was asked why he had decided to create a fish, Aksungur replied that he likes to eat fish and ‘there’s is no concept behind it’. Aksungur says he feels that art has become overworked by intellectual approaches such as those found in conceptual art.

Aksungur habitually alters the scale of his subjects forcing the spectator to reconsider his or her spatial experience, relationship and understanding of the objects presented. For this reason the idea of mass is an ongoing consideration in Aksungur’s work. Bastable made an astute observation and said that ‘when you stand in front of a sculpture that is the size of a huge rock, it is like looking at the thing in extreme close-up, or like staring at it through binoculars, the gigantism focuses and concentrates your attention’. Bastable believes that when Aksungur’s pieces are displayed on a pedestal they become imbued with alternates meaning which are different from our habitual understanding. Bastable says of Aksungur’s works that they ‘become in effect a monument, a statue of a fruit or of a fish. And a statue exists to proclaim the importance of its subject’.