Solo Exhibition Atonal Drift
9 October – 14 November 2020 JD Malat Gallery, London, UK
Zumrutoglu’s canvasses are often epic in both monumental form and shape and sometimes one is not enough and they turn into triptychs. His painterly mark making is similar in the sculptural ceramics introduced into his exhibition Atonal Drift.
David Bellingham – Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London
Solo Exhibition Time For The Salt
10 September – 27 October 2019 Pilevneli Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey
Zümrütoğlu leaves us no doubt that his paintings feed on the tragedy of man, the coexistence of failure and chance. The highly energetic and powerfully-enacted scenes leave an impression on the viewer like shock-frozen moments of life. They, too, are awaiting to be re-transformed into emotions or ideas. However, maybe the most important of all, they show that we carry the whole world within us.
Hans Irrek
Solo Exhibition Mirror Of Darkness
1 October – 13 November 2018 JD Malat Gallery, London, UK
The title of this, Zümrütoğlu’s first UK solo show, Mirror of Darkness is a further indication of the artist’s responses to a body of Romantic and Modernist literature which deals with the binary oppositional nature of human behaviour, based as it is on Joseph Conrad’s postcolonial novel Heart of Darkness. This title also provides a poetic key as to how the viewer might approach this set of paintings, which, as it were, hold up a visual mirror to Conrad’s literary exploration of the hypocritical savage behaviour of ‘civilised’ people in a foreign country, whose Congolese natives are themselves perceived as ‘savages’.
This important exhibition of recent paintings (all produced in 2018) will enable the London audience to appreciate why Zümrütoğlu has been so enthusiastically received from Turkey to Berlin.
David Bellingham, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London
Solo Exhibition Holy Bargaining
30 November 2017 – 13 January 2018 Pilevneli Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey
The dichotomy in Zümrütoğlu of figuration and materiality also has potential symbolic associations specific to the historical imperatives of the Turkish condition that also make themselves felt in the West at large. This is none other than the tension between a globalized modernity and the conservative impulse to defend a national tradition against this international tide, a tension that may be expressed in other words by the dichotomy of secular values, and restrictions imposed by juridical and administrative realities.
Drew Hammond
Solo Exhibition Für Alle und Keinen
Tammen & Partner Galerie, 2016 Berlin, Germany
The portrayed characters are protagonists of our daily life, who suffer pain but yet never give up their existential fight. Sometimes they are perpetrators, sometimes victims. But basically they are all slaves of the system. The particular strength of Zumrutoglu’s works stems from the fact that they never appear pushy, didactic or polemic.
Prof. Dr. Marcus Graf
Solo Exhibition Dark Matter
30 April - 23 May 2015 The Empire Project, Istanbul, Turkey
Zümrütoğlu's paintings are not authoritative; rather they invite to investigate. They always accomodate an "or else" space, a breathing. Paintings speak for themselves. The narrated, the wrath of the paint, the dimensions of space that enhance perception, hung, burned, molten, the vertical rhythm of the "form-losing" body, the violence of the sensation. Like a language about a language... A language which is the sum total of all possible stories.
Özgür Uçkan
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Solo Exhibition Cosmetic Violence
The Empire Project, 2013 Istanbul, Turkey
He most important sources of Erdoğan Zümrütoğlu's reputation for unorthodoxy and eccentricity is the power and force that emerges in his paintings. These are forces that find expression both in the plasticity of his painting language and in the way in which the potential energies of our surroundings enter this plasticity as he attempts to grasp/perceive the world through his painting.
