Canan Tolon's "Sen Söyle" exhibition opens at İstanbul Modern

Canan Tolon's artistic body of work spanning from the 1980s to the present is meeting audiences at İstanbul Modern. The exhibition titled "Sen Söyle," which makes visible the artist's distinctive search for expression and technique ranging from drawing to photography, from painting to installation, opens on 6 September 2019 The exhibition's cohesiveness allows us to reconsider nature and environment, architecture and culture—which affect both the artist and contemporary people from every angle—anew. The exhibition brings together iconic examples of Tolon's transformation and development in art, and also includes reproductions of some of the artist's works that have established their place in art history.

Harmony of Nature and Architecture

At the center of Canan Tolon's work are nature, which continuously renews itself, and the traces left by architecture as a cultural endeavour. Tolon designs an intellectual and visual world around the impact of both existences on each other, the resistance they show to one another, and the contradictions and consequences arising from their encounters. Using natural materials such as grass seed, water and coffee grounds in her works, the artist allows nature to come alive in her paintings by exposing the metal pieces she places on her canvases to open-air conditions. She constructs the marks of time as an important starting point for the formation of her paintings. Canan Tolon's exhibition titled "Sen Söyle," which reflects the chaos, struggle and uncertainty created by humanity's processes of changing and transforming nature in a disquieting atmosphere, can be viewed from 6 September 2019 to 9 February 2020.