Özgür Kar: MACABRE

With his black-and-white animations, Özgür Kar gives life to human characters struggling with existential questions. Like tableaux vivants, sketched out male bodies appear to be trapped inside the confined frame of giant flat screens. Protected from the outside world or ensnared, these solitary giants slowly awaken, in between long silences, to let the muffled murmuring of their melancholic monologues escape.

For Open Space #9, his first solo exhibition in a French museum, Özgür Kar is presenting MACABRE, an audiovisual installation conceived as a play with two characters: a young boy playing the clarinet and an allegory of death, inspired by the popular depictions during the late Middle Ages in Europe. The two protagonists of this imaginary folktale are stretched out, front and back, almost lifeless, resting, or perhaps despondent. Somewhere between music and text, Life and Death respond one to the other, in a strange dialogue that is simultaneously amusing and dark. Developed during the global pandemic, over the course of 2020, MACABRE is the artist’s response to troubling and disquieting state of our world, which invites the spectator to take a moment to reflect on a subject that is ubiquitous today, and indeed, is essential to life in general: death.

Özgür Kar (1992, Turkey) lives and works in Amsterdam. He graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Rijksakademie van Beeldende kunsten (2019–20). His recent personal exhibitions include Storage Drama, Emalin Gallery, London, (2021); Macabre, Kunstverein GartenHaus, Vienna (2021); A Decade of Submission, Edouard Montassut, Paris (2020); Exposed, Europarådets plass, Oslo (2019); A New Start, UKS, Oslo (2019); and Finally, you are in me, Taylor Macklin, Zurich (2018). He is represented by Edouard Montassut in Paris.

Curated by Ludovic Delalande et Claire Staebler, Open Space is a program dedicated to the most contemporary artistic expressions. National and international artists are invited to create a specific project for the Fondation Louis Vuitton. Open Space takes place regularly in different settings around Frank Gehry’s building. Between 2018 and 2021 this programme has hosted solo exhibitions of Jean-Marie Appriou (1986, France), Matt Copson (1992, UK), Anna Hulačová (1984, Czech Republic), Hoël Duret (1988, France), Lauren Halsey (1987, US), Meriem Bennani (1988, Morocco), Jean Claracq (1991, France), Bianca Bondi (1986, South Africa).