MEHMET DERE’S IMAGE INVESTIGATIONS AT MERDİVEN ART SPACE
The exhibition brings together the autobiographical works of Mehmet Dere, one of the leading figures of contemporary art.
For nearly twenty years, Dere has explored how images are perceived and used. He regards images not only as “a window onto the world,” but also as a subject of study in terms of emotional contact. Interested from a young age in the acts of collecting and assembling, the artist has gathered a range of images—from the F11 key and photographs from his own childhood to burnt matches and the comic-book hero Hulk—and re-embodied them within his inner reality.
Another form of Dere’s early attachment to images is evident in his interest in drawing, comic-book culture, and a passion for caricature that began in childhood. From his early collage works to the various installations he has produced to this day, his imagery bears the traces of the society and time he inhabits. As a young art student in the early 2000s, Dere shaped his education in the Painting Department of the Faculty of Fine Arts at Dokuz Eylül University in İzmir through a search for a visual language that could articulate conceptual art and his political stance. His practice has arrived at a distinctive semantic reality that surpasses the everyday aesthetics of reproduced images and carries them into new fields of association.
Dere’s installations function as an inquiry into how images take root in individual and collective memory and how they are reconstructed. By emphasizing the strong emotional resonances of images, his works exert a compelling effect on the viewer. At the same time, he shows that images are not merely visual objects, but symbols laden with cultural meanings, feelings, and memories.
