An installation view of “Suppose You Are Not.” Orhan Cem Çetin, courtesy Arter
The first floor of the year-long, 400-artist Arter exhibition, “Suppose You Are Not,” unfolds denuded in all of its prolific pop, pointing Roy Lichtenstein’s Pistol (1964), a tapestry of a gun, directly at the viewer, sensational to a fault, conveying the show’s underhanded gut punch. Occasionally, such historically canonical names are nestled between a garden variety of more obscure and anonymous artists who deal in naked humanity, as the deformed, struggling against conformity, biological and societal alike. Not least among them, Natural History Ambra 1 (2011) by SANTISSIMI (Antonello Serra & Sara Renzetti) displays the whole, unsightly body of an aged man’s likeness sunk in formaldehyde.
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See all of our newslettersThe crude, scientistic objectification of the modernist nude continues throughout “Suppose You Are Not,” Arter’s inaugural curation of a single private art collection, which happens to be that of its parent sponsor’s chairman, Turkish billionaire Ömer M. Koç. Its outward appeal is derived from the nature of exposure, namely to disrobe the plutocrat for a fraction of what he’s worth in the eye of the public, to give the people a glimpse of a mind who lords over them. What they might see are traces of a man captivated by the myth of the tortured artist as visions of death, violence, poverty and other horrors of isolated bodies face off with unforgiving modernism.
I Am Mortal (1988) by Valeriy Gerlovin, Rimma Gerlovina and Mark Berghash poses a photograph of a balding man whose forehead is inked black, spelling out “immortal” while he holds up his pointer finger to replace the second “M” with a red “A” at his fingertip. This beside reams of macabre, commiserative self-portraiture, Nan Goldin’s swollen-eye battered Self-Portrait (1980-1992) or Tania Bruguera’s The Burden of Guilt II (1997-1999), in which the artist faces the camera with a gutted animal over her body. Yet, these profound self-examinations are then littered with sardonic kitsch like Ceylan Öztürk’s Happy New Fear (2012), the title in the form of an eyesore, all-too-common holiday ornament, or the comically profane Exit Jesus (2014) by Nancy Fouts, picturing a neon Christ holding up the “X” on an exit sign like a cross.
The exhibition appears to reveal hints of psychological strain. Orhan Cem Çetin, courtesy ArterThe unevenness of these sporadically aligned........