Artist Statement/ Biography

Oscillating between painting, sculpture, installation, and photography, the central theme of Ahmet Civelek’s practice is destruction. Using industrial materials or everyday items, objects are further destroyed to create a final artwork. His installations are often participatory, revealing the destructive process in different ways, with the audience ultimately giving the piece its meaning. Recently, Civelek has focused on a variety of techniques using sandpaper as his primary media. For him, this industrial material is a place of conflict and contradiction. This notion exposes a risk we seem to willingly accept: that something we produce and consume can potentially damage us and degrade the objects around us, even as it appears to make life more polished, easier, and better.

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Ahmet Civelek was born in 1988 in New York City and raised in Istanbul. He returned to New York to study at Pratt Institute (BFA, 2009) and later lived in London to study at Central Saint Martins (Post-Graduate Diploma, 2010). His most recent exhibition was with Oktem Aykut at Condo Londonin 2020. Previous solo exhibitions include “Number 3: Grit,” Pi Artworks, Istanbul (2018); “Number 2: Cycles,” at Entrance, New York (2017); and “Number 1,” at Galerie Mourlot, New York (2012). He has been awarded residencies previously at the Vermont Studio Center (2017), Arteles, Finland (2015), and Autocenter, Berlin (2013). Civelek lives and works in New York and continues to visit London and Istanbul regularly.