MEHMET ÇEVİK

Born in 1984 in Mersin, Mehmet Çevik is a graduate of Anadolu University Faculty of Fine Arts, Department of Painting and the MFA Program in Painting at the same university. Çevik who worked as teaching staff at Uludağ University for two years, has been continuing his artistic practice at his studio in Istanbul since 2014.

Art Historian Prof. Dr. Bahadır Gülmez describes Mehmet Çevik’s art in the following words: “In his life there are multiplied figures. Plural figures derived from themselves but referring each time to ‘other states of being’.Mehmet is not an activist of sadness. He is not an activist of melancholy. In his works he constructs fragmented relationships, yet they contain moments of entertainment, imagination, masking, slow motion.” On the other hand, in reference to his own practice, Çevik says: “These are figures that I control, through whom I satisfy my pathetic human emotion and desire for power, and I want them to exist, to be visible. […] I perform my new paintings directly through the method of begin-and-apply, without preliminary sketch or design. No theme, story or narrative exists within the process of beginning nor during it. This reflex is a reduction of the priority to the action, the actuality and the actual.”