Gökçen Cabadan, The Past You Left Behind, 2017, Oil on canvas, 60x90 cm

“I hope that I'm working on matters related to the human condition and the cosmos at large, with all its delusions.”

GÖKÇEN CABADAN studied painting and art first at Dokuz Eylül University in Izmir and then in KASK in Ghent, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Belgium. Cabadan belongs to an audacious group of artists from Turkey that dealt with the issues of queer identity since the late 1990s and developed subtle ways of expression that undermine the established visual and aesthetic male complicity. He has come to utilize his works to subvert traditional understandings of the ways in which paintings are conventionally presented and perceived. Cabadan’s authentic interpretations of traditional genres, subjects and techniques in the history of painting have come to provide his means for a subtle critique of the contemporary society’s treatment of queer culture.

“I prefer being spontaneous; I let things develop on their own. This approach makes room for all my feelings.Sometimes a painting can have a humorous atmosphere, and sometimes it will be very depressive or dull... When I feel a certain way, my sense of reality is shaped by that feeling. When I am happy, I think: 'Yes, the whole world feels this way,' and when I am sad, the whole world turns dark. When I fall in love, I see everything through the eyes of a lover. In my work, I aim to preserve the lens through which I look at the world in that very moment, to allow my perception to be dictated by my emotions, and to hold the resulting diversity of styles together. This is the path I follow in my work.”

“In a consciously hedonistic fashion, I make paintings by adhering only to my own feelings and desires.”

“I guess it’s like the planets. They come in all shapes and colors, but there is a certain synchronicity to them; they are in harmony. I’ve started to see the outside world through the lens of this metaphor. I like variety and I enjoy eclectic structures.”

“Gökçen Cabadan is the most skillful Turkish painter of his generation. Since his solo debut in 2008, Cabadan has often considered uncanny objects—dressed mannequins in a shopwindow, part of a skeleton inside a fountain, a man playing with a set of Russian dolls—in his oil paintings and pastels. Working from images found in magazines or online ads and using bright colors, passages of pure abstraction, and various types of estrangement effect, Cabadan presents us with figures who seek shelter and privacy even as they find themselves on public display. His subjects’ gaze often meets that of the viewer, complicating the identities of the former and the assumptions of the latter.”

– Kaya Genç, Artforum