Metanoia: Hakan Gürbüzer

Who a person is can rarely be contained within a single image; it reveals itself instead in what is dispersed around that image. Hakan Gürbüzer’s paintings emerge precisely within this state of dispersion, between the face presented to the outside world and the life experienced within, between what is remembered and what belongs to the present, between the distance maintained amid the crowd and the inner world that accumulates beneath it. To reflect on the artist’s practice today requires us to approach concepts such as memory and identity from a renewed perspective, particularly within a visual culture where transformation has been reduced to the rhetoric of self-improvement and the self is continually presented as an image that can be corrected, curated, and rendered coherent.

The artist’s solo exhibition at Galeri 77 takes its title from metanoia, a concept that describes a profound transformation in one’s mindset, worldview, beliefs, and ways of thinking that is a process through which the self is mentally reconfigured. Within this framework, the human figure and the tension between the inner world and the reality that surrounds it lie at the heart of Gürbüzer’s practice. Loneliness amid the crowd, the search for identity, memory, belonging, and the traces left by time upon the individual are concerns to which the artist continually returns.

Formally, this approach becomes visible throughout the exhibition through the interplay of Cubism, hyperrealist detail, and the logic of collage. By bringing multiple viewpoints and temporalities together upon the same surface, Cubist fragmentation emphasizes the multilayered nature of identity, particularly through the deformation of the face in Gürbüzer’s portraits. Alongside this fragmentation, hyperrealist clarity establishes a second mode of seeing. Through its relationship with the photographic gaze, it produces an image regime that fixes the moment, records detail, and brings the depicted object closer to visible reality. By bringing these two approaches together within a single visual language, Gürbüzer opens the pictorial surface to the tension between what is remembered and what is recorded. His formal language ultimately allows the viewer to witness how the different temporalities, experiences, and contradictions that constitute these figures can coexist.