ABOUT SUZY HUG LEVY & TOMUR ATAGÖK
Suzy Levy was born in Istanbul, 1944, Robert College ’65, B.A. Founding member of the Schneidertempel Cultural Centre. Founding member of the Istanbul Modern Art Museum Foundation. Charter member of the Istanbul Philarmonic Orchestra Association. Member of SANART Art and Culture Organisation. Member of PCD-UNESCO Plastic Arts Organisation. Since 2000 selected for inclusion in ‘The Marquis Who’s Who In the World’, ‘IBC, Dictionary of International Biography’. Works in Izmir Museum of Modern Art, Akbank, Sabancı University, İşbank, Fabrica Benneton and private collections in Turkey, U.S.A., Switzerland, France, England and Japan. AWARDS: 2005 IJAWA Merit Award ( ARCADIA ) video. 2004 INTERNATIONAL JEWISH ARTIST OF THE YEAR (Sculpture) / The London Jewish Museum of Art, London, England. 2002 AWARD, Tunis Biennial, Tunis. 1998 ARTIST OF THE YEAR (Sculpture) Ankara Arts Council, Turkey. 1997 BIENNIAL AWARD ‘Sharjah International Arts Biennal’. 1993 CONTEMPORARY ARTIST OF THE YEAR / Painting and Sculpture Museum Association, Istanbul, Turkey. The Istanbul born artist Tomur Atagök received BFA and MA degrees in the United State of America (University of California, Berkeley) after the graduation from the Robert College in Turkey. After her position as the Assistant Director of Mimar Sinan University Museum of Painting and Sculpture Tomur Atagök started to work as Head of Culture, Press and Public Relations at Yıldız Technical University. She founded and chaired the only Museum Studies Graduate Program in Turkey in 1989. She researched, worked projects and wrote on arts and museums. She realized many one person exhibitions along with national and international exhibitions. Tomur ATAGÖK has been living and working in Demirciköy, Sarıyer, İstanbul since her retirement in 2006. Suzy Hug Levy’s garments reveal the human body, one of the biggest conundrums faced by art today, as an environment, a void, and a mystery as well as a game; and by doing so she forces us to think in terms of processes and transformations that are both humanistic and cultural. Marshal McLuhan once noted that we wear clothes to protect ourselves against the environment; but that at the same time our clothes also create a new environment: an environment that defends us not only against the elements but also against enemies, rivals, and boredom; as a means to cope with a world shaped by fashion. Using the metal, rubber, wire, and nails that are the raw materials of industry and belong to the mechanical world, Hug Levy conjures up transparancies, shadows, and reflections as well as a dreamlike movement that she creates by freeing the body from the pull of gravity. In spite of the almost nostalgic beauty created by the textures and their lights and shadows, her garment statues and especially her performances make reference to contemporary dilemmas such as the environment, culture, and women’s issues. Hug Levy’s work presents a rare synthesis of aesthetic qualities with avant-garde notions of questioning and experimentation. Suzy Hug Levy’s garment sculptures should not be viewed in isolation or under ideal, static conditions but rather as part of the continuum of life: embodied in them are both the imaginary and the physical interacting in endlessly changing relationships, to be percieved as being and non-existence, as one’s own self or the other, on the stage and in the mind. In this way Hug Levy’s sculptures resolve the problems of fixed, massive sculpture while also bringing new energy to the debate over the human body, a subject that has long been idealized, enabling us to see it as an incorporation of space and matter: an amalgamation of physical being and insubstantial soul. Prof. Dr. Jale N. Erzen, Tomur Atagök says: While I previously considered space as a matter of relations among forms, I started to think of it as a changing living threesome relationship among artist- art object-perceiver. The work created by the artist is recreated everytime by the others. Thus the act initiated by the artist reaches to a different artistic phenomenon with each viewer. The work of art, besides reflecting the truth of its creator contains the feelings and thoughts of its perceiver. The pictorial reality and space on metalic surface containing the hints the artist gets from the environment, the symbols and the descriptions she uses in making references to the outside world, the different realities of the materials and the techniques, the images reflected from the environment and the perceiver on the surface of the metalic work, and finally the interpretation of the perceiver each time create different subjective and materialistic realities of art. On the other hand while pictorial reality and space, changing physically with the reflections from the environment and the perceiver himself, and joining with the physical environment and movement, advances towards the combination of life with art.
"BEING WOMAN"
The works of Tomur Atagok and Suzy Hug Levy are at Gallery G-Art..
In the exhibition, the works of both artists come together under the title of 'Being a Woman'. The exhibition will feature goddesses painted by Tomur Atagök throughout her art life, from Medusa to Madonna, and Suzy Hug Levy's wearable sculptures that present the human body as the environment, space, image, privacy and a game, making people think in a global process and transformation. . The women, who are the subject of the works of both artists, have the characteristics of goddesses in different cultures, beliefs and mythology; as creative as muses, as dignified as Hera, as beautiful as Ezuli and Lashmi, as powerful as Vagadu, as wise as Shekinah and Saga, as sexual as Venus and Radha, as fertile as Haumea, as angry as Nemesis, as magical as Hecate, as charming as Kuandisa, as fierce as Sekhmet Brave as Mella and Skatkach, warrior as Athena and Senamuki.
Standing as a protector in Tomur Atagok's paintings, the human-sized Goddess gains a different size as she joins our world. Rather than a symbol of fertility, the goddess represents women's power, but also a demonstration of women's energy and authority. The goddess in the artist's works sometimes wears a mechanical crown on her head, and sometimes appears in a luminous shower. In Atagök's works, this neolithic feminine power, both literal and figurative, is pretentiously painted on large, reflective metal surfaces, often in pink and red.
Suzy Hug Levy brings an imaginary movement to the raw materials of the industrial and machine world such as metal, rubber, wire and nails, with transparency, shadows, reflections and the body's separation from gravity. In her “wearable sculptures”, the artist alludes to the subjects that are the focus of contemporary problematics such as the environment, culture and women, despite the almost nostalgic beauty of the textures, light and shadows she creates. At the same time, she offers a rare synthesis that can contain aesthetic qualities within a contemporary questioning and empiricism. Suzy Hug Levy's “wearable sculptures” are shaped and exhibited not to be seen in isolation from fixed ideal conditions, but to be perceived as oneself and the other, on stage and in the mind, between existence and non-existence, always in eternal and transformative relationships, as in the fluency, imagination and materiality of life. statues. With all these features, Levy's sculptures dissolve the fixed and massive sculpture and bring back the body, which he had idealized for centuries, as “space and matter”, “being and soul”.
