Yüksel Arslan: Various works (1986–1987)

Overview

Yüksel Arslan has been associated with both the surrealist movement in Turkey and the intellectual circles of 1960s Paris. Mining the depths of the unconscious mind, his work connects critical thought and spirituality, existing between mythology, science and the visual arts.

Arslan combined the word art with the French suffix ure (as in peinture [painting] or écriture [writing]) to create the word arture and he named his works as artures which he made on paper. Included in Unsettled Objects are two of the artist’s works from his ‘Artures’ series which exist in-between Western and Eastern aesthetics. His Artures, including the exhibited, Arture 362, L’Homme III (1986) and Arture 370, Mediateurs L’Homme (1987) are painted with organic pigments from various vegetable extracts, bodily fluids and other natural materials that the artist mixed with substances such as oil, coal and stone. By the time of his death in 2017, Arslan had created more than 700 ‘Artures’ in his lifetime, reflecting on subject matters such as botany, ethnology, biography, architecture, politics, autobiography, history and fantasy.