More works by Murat Germen
The many windows
READY TO HANG
Out of the box, all LUMAS artworks are ready and easy to hang.
SECURELY PACKAGED
LUMAS works are always packed to the highest standard to make sure it arrives as perfectly as it leaves us.
ARTIST SUPPORTED
Your purchase supports the free and independent work of your favorite artist.
EXTENDED RIGHT OF RETURN
Say it with art. Because of the Christmas season, we have extended your right of return until January 10th!
Our curators recommend
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
SLAT ART
With his Slat Art editions, Murat German is carving a new artistic path while staying true to his unmistakeable style. This extraordinary, dual-layered technique is the perfect evolution of Germen’s characteristic aesthetic and makes the photograph positively intoxicating. A second layer is split into strips and mounted above the initial photo to create a distinct visual effect that is both exciting and intriguing. The urban jungle in all its diversity unfolds before our eyes. The artist unifies the dimensions of time and space in an exceptional art form that provides entirely new perspectives on the city.
Murat Germen – The Fascination of Cities
The Turkish artist Murat German belongs to the most well-known photographers of his country, and this despite that fact that his defining approach is to use photography as a medium for depicting mistrust. “Photography records the surface information, where one can only depict the exterior features of objects (color, texture, shape, etc.) and the resulting visual representation cannot incorporate the internal condition / content / soul. I also aim to make photos that carry the many traces of time, multiple dimensions of space and finally create photos usually invisible to the naked eye…”
Murat German should perhaps be viewed less as a photographer, and more as a photo artist who uses photography to transcend the genre itself. He is able to do this by digital editing his material on computer. “I tend to concentrate” he explains “on extracting beauty out of ordinary. I attempt to defamiliarize ordinariness, render it ambiguous by alienating it from its familiar context and finally make people to ‘see it afresh…”
The Professor for Art, Photography, and New Media at Sabanci University has long been interested in urban landscapes and architecture, and was actually educated as a town planner and architect. To portray cities as one experiences them, however, is no easy task. A simple shot of a city reveals nothing about the feelings that grip us when we first visit it. The muddle of streets, the diverse architectonic styles, the traces left behind everywhere by previous eras. It seems that Murat Germen has found a way, through photography, to capture the many difference faces of a city. He uses photography not as a means to depict reality, but rather as an artistic form of expression and an instrument through which to explore his environment.
The images in his series “The Many Windows” all have the same format: 60 narrow strips taken from different photographs appear on the left, and flow into a singular photograph on the right. The impression created is one of intense urban thickening; a compression of space. This captures more of the city than would be possible with a single shot. The image appears both foreign and familiar – as a cityscape it is unknown to us, but we recognise the inner emotion of a complex, historically layered space basic photography could never produce. Murat Germen’s compositions emerge from experiments on the computer with vertical strips. The results are fascinating compressions, successful aesthetic translations of urbanity.VITA
1965 Born in Istanbul, Turkey 1983-1987 Technical University of Istanbul, Turkey 1988-1992 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA Lives and works in Istanbul, Turkey
