Painting diary of an itinerant on show

İş Sanat Kibele Art Gallery hosts traveler-artist Muhsin Kut's retrospective exhibition "Painting Diary of an Itinerant" that features his nearly 60 years of art life.

Kut, who worked with a spatula on canvas from his first open-air exhibition on the wall next to the stairs to Taksim Square in 1959 until the late 1960s, has produced mainly pattern-oriented works in the years following. Noting, "The black pen tolerates mistakes; however, the ball-point pen and the fountain pen do not like errors," Kut later gave up his black pen and diligently produced many works with ballpoint and fountain pens.

The countries he traveled to and especially Istanbul, where he was born and raised, are Kut's main subjects. Istanbul is an inexhaustible resource for the artist with its rooftops, harbors, ships and streets. In the exhibition catalog Kut says: "Painting Istanbul is both easy and difficult, especially if I have chosen the Bosporus or a surrounding neighborhood or a district as my subject. As a painter who has been doing Istanbul landscapes for years, I have tried to portray whatever has caught my eye without looking at its beauty or ugliness."

Observing the places and objects he looks at with sharp intelligence, Kut often reflects his irony-filled perspective in his paintings. The artist paints with an economical style in color and fills the surface of the canvas without exhausting the viewer. What we see when we look is the instant recording and aesthetic value of the place that he has chosen. The lines turn into contours on the way, framing the walls, roads, electrical wires, ship masts, doorknobs and other details that become sharpened in the paintings.

Kut's paintings have been a "traveler's diary" since his first exhibition in 1959. Istanbul, Sydney, Amsterdam, Prague, Tasmania, Venice, Symi and many more places and moments are first recorded on paper from Kut's perspective and then on canvas. The artist captures whatever catches his eye on paper while sitting in a cafe or on a bench; he draws everything he sees and keeps it. Everything he draws, in time, becomes part of his artistic diary.

His passion for painting, which started in the house where he was born in Bakırköy before he entered the Academy, his education afterwards and his universe that he fits in the world, drags him to new and different subjects every time.

While art lovers will be able to see the cities and subjects that Kut has concentrated on over the years through this retrospective exhibition, they will also have a chance to see the places he has transmitted through the language of painting. Images from the mid-1950s to today invite visitors to focus on the production language of the artist. The exhibition can be visited at İş Sanat Kibele Art Gallery until April 15.