EXHIBITION: In Dialogue: Aret Gıcır & Stijn Ank Clubhouse Hosts Öktem Aykut 2026

 

In Dialogue: Aret Gıcır & Stijn Ank 

Clubhouse Hosts Öktem Aykut

Aret Gıcır, Stijn Ank

August 7 - October 4, 2026

The exhibition brings together works by Aret Gıcır and Stijn Ank across the interior and garden of Clubhouse. Works from two of Gıcır’s abstract painting series are presented indoors, while Ank’s plaster sculptures inhabit the garden.

Aret Gıcır’s Before Leaving series, consisting of 16 canvases produced between 2023 and 2026, is presented together in its entirety for the first time at Clubhouse. Stijn Ank’s plaster sculptures, which continue to transform through their exposure to the open air, are brought together in an outdoor setting in Istanbul for the first time.

Stijn Ank (*1977) works intuitively, creating molds from different materials that delineate specific spatial boundaries. Into these molds, he pours liquid plaster, a substance derived from seawater salts and mixed with natural pigments sourced from minerals. As the plaster sets, it undergoes a crystallization process reminiscent of coral growth, capturing a tension between fluidity and solidity. Once released from their molds, Ank’s sculptures become meditations on the fragile beauty of existence, bearing witness to cycles of materiality, space, light, and time.

Institutional solo exhibitions include IMMA, Dublin (2025); Kunsthaus Lempertz, Brussels (2024); Le Musée du Louvre, Paris (2022); Academia Belgica, Rome (2020); Club Solo & Van Abbemuseum, Breda (2019); Bastide Projects, Marseille (2018); MoCA Museum, Taipei (2017); Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2017); Forum d’Art Contemporain, Luxembourg (2014); and S.M.A.K., Ghent (2012). Ank’s solo exhibition Desire took place at Öktem Aykut in 2022. The artist lives and works in Ghent.

Aret Gıcır (*1978) studied painting at the Yerevan State Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 2008. His painterly language has a heavy yet ephemeral quality that points to subtle ambiguities across personal, societal, and historical narratives. Gıcır works predominantly through thematic series of abstract paintings. Each work is built through layers of tonalities and refractions of light and darkness; deliberate brushstrokes fold into one another, creating contrasts and depths reminiscent of fleeting shadows. While each painting stands as an autonomous entity, it acquires new meanings through its relationship with neighboring works, continuously redefining the whole.

Gıcır has held four solo exhibitions with Öktem Aykut and has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Turkey. He lives and works in Istanbul and Boston.

ART FAIR: Artissima 2025

ARTISSIMA 2025 Installation Shot

 

ARTISSIMA 

30.10. — 02.11.2025   Booth: Dark Blue 7

Öktem Aykut brings together a duo presentation by Francesco Albano and Aret Gıcır. Francesco Albano presents sculptures from his latest series The Blind Leading the Blind. Albano turns the metaphor of blindness into a physical and emotional condition. Drawing on the moral and political power of Bruegel’s famous painting, Albano stages a moment of imminent collapse, not just of bodies, but of memory itself. The three figures, bound together by elastic tension, navigate the space as if memory were a mechanical prosthesis that is fractured, uncertain, and partial. Through fragile materials and ambiguous postures, Albano creates a sculptural vocabulary of accident and loss. They resist stability, suggesting that in the absence of clear direction or vision, what remains is the instinct to connect, to lean, to carry and be carried, even blindly. Aret Gıcır's new series Before Leaving consists of 16 paintings. Each piece is interlaced with layer upon layer of tonalities and refractions of light and darkness, each intended brushstroke seeking to envelope itself, creating contrasts between and depths that are reminiscent of fleeting shadows. Each painting stands as an autonomous entity yet gains new meanings through its relationship with neighboring pieces, and the whole is continuously redefined. With Albano and Gıcır's works, the viewer is lured into enchanting abyss, ambiguity reconnects with robust textures and a viscerally intense perception.

EXHIBITION: After Image 2024

"After Image" - Installation Shot 2024

 

After Image

September 25 – November 9, 2024

 

Aret Gıcır’s one-person exhibition After Image traces what remains of the echoes of an ordinary day, an extraordinary landscape, a fleeting encounter, a friendship that transcends time, an unexpected loss, or an impasse. Like the lingering images that float across the eye’s retina after one gazes at the sun or a bright light source, the abstract forms in After Image are at once vivid, coincidental and elusive. In these paintings, the complex shades of black floating in space and the focused colors seeking to envelope them create perennial contrasts between, on the one hand, depths that are reminiscent of wells and, on the other hand, of fleeting shadows. Each painting features fluid, malleable shapes evocative of body parts, and which transform across the canvases to craft a visual narrative steeped in contingency, unexpected possibilities, and occasionally the spectral. After Image is ultimately a contemplation on the ephemeral yet indelible marks that experiences and relationships leave behind. Holding in tension continuity and change, each work in the exhibition stands as an autonomous entity yet gains new meanings through its relationship with neighboring pieces, and the whole is continuously redefined by its parts.

ART FAIR: Artissima 2022

ARTISSIMA Installation Shot 2022

 

ARTISSIMA  4-6 November, 2022

In Artissima 2022, Öktem Aykut presents works by Silva Bingaz, Aret Gıcır and Emel Kurhan. The gallery has been working extensively with all three artists since its founding in 2014. Gıcır works in thematic series that entail different genres of paintings, yet he is mostly known for his rather large scale abstractions with oil on canvas. Kurhan works in embroidery and incorporates a unique pop approach in her works. Bingaz’s work depends on instant images that capture intimate moments.The presentation aims to touch issues of sexuality, domesticity and privacy. The subtleties these themes involve will be drawn by the togetherness of three distinct styles of expression and use of material. The photographs by Bingaz are from her 2017 series that she has developed in Latvia. The series depict people Bingaz has briefly met in and outside Riga in highly intimate moments in their private settings. Gıcır’s latest body of work originates from his painterly interrogations on light and shadow. His experimentations let him achieve a series of abstract paintings that also relate to and illustrate dualities of gender; of body and movement; of space and the mass. Kurhan on the other hand is interested in the private moments of solitude in domestic life, where one is left alone to play games to keep himself/herself entertained and simply to pass time. Her embroideries present a peculiar contrast between the peace and the terror that domestic solitude entails.

ART FAIR: Abu Dhabi Art Fair 2022

Abu Dhabi Art Fair  Installation Shot  2022

 

ABU DHABI ART FAIR  16-20 November 2022

In the upcoming edition of Abu Dhabi Art; Öktem Aykut will present works by Koray Ariş, Aret Gıcır and Emel Kurhan.Gıcır works in thematic series that entail different genres of paintings, yet he is mostly known for his rather large scale abstractions on oil on canvas. Kurhan works in embroidery and incorporates a unique pop approach in her works. Arişforms his abstract works in organic material through a process of elimination and diminishment.The presentation aims to highlight three artists' shared artistic quality of working with processual methods.

EXHIBITION: Waiting for Life 2019

Waiting for Life - Installation Shot 2019

WAITING FOR LIFE

Aret Gicir’s new exhibition, Waiting for Life, opens on September 6, 2019 and runs through October 5, 2019 at Gallery Oktem Aykut. Taking its cue from a suicide bombing, Waiting for Life pursues the hidden ambiguities in the continuous and seemingly fixed movement between life and death.

The suicide bomb exploded meters away from Gicir’s studio. The artist’s unwitting witnessing of the unfolding lethal tragedy is juxtaposed against the footage of the explosion he has subsequently combed through as his visual archive. Gicir traces in his own imagination the footprints of the terrifying ball of fire and the cloud of dust that enveloped the scene. He embarks on a purely visual investigation of existence, perception and temporality as refracted through the lens of coincidence, anxiety and hope. At the same time as Gicir’s paintings enact a paradoxical reversal of the cataclysmic scene by conjuring vitality and brightness, the faceless portraits that accompany these paintings implicate those culpable in the creation of such an apocalyptic atmosphere.

Waiting for Life is Aret Gicir’s fourth solo exhibition. The opening reception on Sept 6 between 18:30-20:30 will be followed by a breakfast roundtable on September 9 at 10am to present and discuss Gicir’s works.

EXHIBITION: From Day to Day 2016

From Day to Day" - Installation Shot Galata Greek School, Istanbul

 

FROM DAY TO DAY

Aret Gicir’s third solo exhibition, "From Day to Day", will take place at the Galata Greek School from May 7 to June 4, 2016, in collaboration with Öktem&Aykut. The opening is on May 7, Saturday, between 16:00 - 19.00.

The exhibition titled "From Day to Day" departs from a diagnosis: frontotemporal dementia. This is the medical condition that has led the Istanbul Armenian Patriarch Mesrob II (Mesrob Mutafyan) to an unconscious and bed ridden existence for years. It is also the point of origin for Aret Gicir’s subsequent peregrinations into memory, history, forgetting, and a time suspended between life and death.
Its title inspired by the first published poem of Garbis Cancikyan, the exhibition elicits parallels between, on the one hand, the lost consciousness of the Patriarch and the surrounding suspicions in regard to it cause, and on the other hand, the fading away, from day to day, of a traumatised collective memory.