Murat Önen

The paintings and drawings of Düsseldorf painter Murat Önen reveal configurations of new masculinity, subversive references to his own development through subculture and the club scene, as well as a humorous and at the same time profound examination of paradigms of art history. In recent years, he has developed into one of the most complex and popular young painters in the German-speaking art world. He paints in his distinctive, always recognizable style, in which classical formal elements and his increasingly abstract formal language create complex, ambiguous and multi-coloured pictorial spaces. Based on a classical training in painting in Istanbul, he refers – sometimes obviously, sometimes subtly – to caesuras in the history of painting: opulent baroque compositions, impressionist plays of light, modular, modern abstraction and contemporary figuration. His move from Istanbul to Dresden in 2012 marked the beginning of a stylistic metamorphosis that has since developed into a constant painterly self-questioning. The early works from his time at the Dresden Art Academy until 2017, where he studied in the class of the painter and GDR emigrant Ralf Kerbach, are strongly characterized by an examination of the figure. Inspired by the mechanistic image of humankind that dominated the art of the former Eastern Bloc until long after reunification, Murat Önen's style is characterized by the typical, limb-doll-like body images and tubular extremities. It is gatherings, collective bodies, ecstatic moments that interest the painter, as well as the depiction of a close familiarity and intimacy between the depicted, which often originate from real models from Önen's circle of friends. The places where he sets his figures in the picture are rhythmic spaces – techno clubs, private parties, circles of friends. Pictorial spaces that are enlivened by the painter's increasingly visible brushstrokes. Since moving to the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in Yeşim Akdeniz's class and graduating in 2023, Önen's focus has repeatedly drifted towards the pictorial-spatial components. The boundaries between the levels often become blurred, figures are in the process of merging, the bodies dissolve into the abstract visual spaces, which consist only of colors. In the increasing abstraction, an intensified focus on inner processes and the perception of interpersonal relationships finds its painterly expression. In portraits and self-portraits, brushstrokes now sometimes go their own way – away from figuration. The lumps of figures – piles – which are repeated like a painterly mantra in Önen's works, transform from a modular play with the body to a painterly experiment on the canvas. In his solo exhibition at the Neuer Aachner Kunstverein in 2023, Önen also explored questions of display and developed a system of collage between classic salon hanging and post-digital flood of images. In addition to their status as autonomous panel paintings, the works acquire an additional quality as interlinked components of an artistic dramaturgy that acts as a formal bracket around the multi-layered works. Murat Önen graduated from the Istanbul Avni Akyol Anadolu Güzel Sanatlar Lisesi, studied at the Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts in Istanbul from 2011 to 2012 and at the Dresden University of Fine Arts (class of Prof. Ralf Kerbach) from 2012 to 2017. From 2018 to 2023 he studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (class of Prof. Yeşim Akdeniz). His works are shown internationally: "doing the work", Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen (2023); "Age of Self", Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf (2022); "Haystacks", Ballon Rouge, Brussels and DUVE, Berlin (2022); "Vielleicht, um schönere Wagen zu fahren", Gemeinde, Cologne (2021), "Sein Kummer ist größer als die Berge", Galerie NEVVEN, Gothenburg (2021); "re. form", Ballon Rouge, Brussels (2020); "Hallöchen", Robert Grünenberg, Berlin (with Sonya Yakovleva) (2020); "Looking for NOW", Oberüber Karger, Dresden (2020)