MINIMUM with SUNFLOWER

One of the major sculptors in Turkey, Şadi Çalık, will be our second guest.

The reason why I make a tribute to Çalık is that I had great times under one of his sculptures. All of the students of Middle East Technical University (METU) know that sculpture because it is like a meeting place to relax between some boring lectures. The sculpture which is realized in 1966 is called METU Ataturk Memorial. It is a milestone for Turkish sculpture because it is the first abstract style Ataturk memorial in Turkey.

And for those who are not familiar with the Ataturk Memorial, here is a picture of another well-known sculpture of him: Galatasaray 50th Anniversary Monument, in the shape of an arrow reaching to the sky, a symbol of development and progress and a memorial in witness of three generations of Istanbul inhabitants. In this work his use of lines as a material can be seen. His obsession for using line and the idea that it could express many things is a feature of his understanding of clarity, lightness and volatility.

His work "Minimum" which he created in 1957 will be the main inspiration of this post’s work. Şadi Çalık explains his Minimum as “the worth of a single line in space”. For this tribute, I used a dry sunflower which I’ve picked from our garden. When I picked them up I didn’t know how exactly I was going to use them but I loved them because they were so straight and stiff. They had still their roots on them but no leaves. They looked very potent. I think this immediate attraction was because of the power of a single line as Şadi Çalık mentioned before as “the worth of a single line in space”.

Below you can see the original "Minimum" of Şadi Çalık and my "Minimum with Sunflower" respectively:

The abstract expressionist painter Hans Hartung and the German sculptor Uhlmann interested him. He admired Antoine Pevsner, Naum Gabo and Max Bill for their movement towards natural science. Later he became interested in Rothko and Fontana, and Mary Vieira, whom he saw at the 1967 Venice Biennale, had a profound influence on him. Here you can see works of Hans Hartung and Lucio Fontana, respectively: