Özlem Altın in the Berlinische Galerie: Tissue and Feelings

Prices are currently an issue in Özlem Altın’s work. This year she received two important awards: the Hannah Höch Sponsorship Prize and the Tiemann Prize, which is associated with a purchase. On October 23rd, two important dyptichs by the Berlin-based artist will go to the Magdeburg Art Museum and will be exhibited there after their ceremonial handover.

“Naked Eye (landscape)” is the name of one of the works for which the museum applied for the 50,000 euros, which the Tiemann Foundation awarded for the second time. The picture, which became the property of the institution together with the two-part work “Hieroglyph (transfer through touch)” and “Hieroglyph (mechanism)”, was able to convince the jury – it fits the collection and represents promising contemporary art should still withstand critical scrutiny in a few decades.

The jury is thus leaning way out of the window. Predictions as to which paintings – the private foundation is exclusively concerned with “promoting an outstanding position in painting” – will outlast the present are always risky. But Altın also convinced the committee for the Hannah Höch Prize: it has been awarded every two years since 2011 for the complete works of a younger generation; his prize money of 38,000 euros is linked to an exhibition that is currently taking place in the Berlinische Galerie.

Exuberant show

It is a small yet exuberant show with the chance to get an impression of Altın’s work for yourself. “A journey into the interior of the body” is what the artist calls her mixture of images from various years, in front of which three deep red foils are lowered at the entrance to the exhibition room. Like curtains that protect the work from quick visual access, while at the same time making individual works visible through semi-transparent windows.

This parallelism of contradictory states takes you right into the artist’s universe. Özlem Altın, born in 1977, avoids any restrictive definition. She uses color and positive and negative photographs, paints abstractly and figuratively, looks at landscapes and at the same time deep beneath their surfaces. Or does she paint skin and at the same moment dive into the interior of the body, which consists of blood and cells, tissue and feelings?

That remains in limbo, better: the perspective is constantly changing. When you look at it, you lose your grip, but that’s not unpleasant. Anyone who uses the fluidity in the paintings for themselves and accepts that Altın is aiming for neither a hierarchy of the objects depicted nor linear narratives will sensitize their own perception.

Red glowing key work

From a pool of found footage or photographs she took herself, she repeatedly fishes out motifs that are printed oversized on primed canvases. After they have been partially painted over, all that remains are fragments: groping hands, arms like tendrils, parts of plants, animal heads and, again and again, eyes. As in the landscape format “Naked Eye (landscape)” from 2022, which hangs centrally in the Berlinische Galerie before moving to Magdeburg. A key work, glowing red, in which Altın’s artistic intentions culminate.

Each of the two parts of the picture is dominated by a monumental eye. Circular, eyelashless and dark like the gate to a cave. For Altın, they are “portals” that pave the way to an intermediate realm. Her images take us to places that are neither inside nor outside, not concrete and certainly not purely ephemeral. In the work of this exciting artist you are always in between.

In the catalog for the exhibition, the author Maren Lübbke-Tidow warns “to put perception before understanding”. In fact, the enigmatic webs of bodies and things in the stream of color swirls encourage associative reception. They bring gestures, memories, vulnerable intimacy and a private image archive to the surface: Özlem Altın dares a lot. Her works overcome distances, space and time disappear. In their place are fragile networks in which people and animals, myths and masks connect with each other.

Like a dream image, history and the present, desert and water, the unconscious mix with ancient rituals that included snakes and (possibly) entrails. “Prisma”, the title of the exhibition in the Berlinische Galerie, alludes to the state in which Özlem Altın places the viewers of her art. As if it unfolds a kaleidoscope of parallel impressions that only want to have an effect before their analytical reception.

The eyes act as a gate; what is seen is reflected beyond the retina on the complex path to the brain. Or in pictures like “Naked Eye (landscape)” as a place of vibrations, overlays, insights. Altın shifts the process to some extent into her art. Timeless and full of curiosity about the question of how much we actually know about ourselves.