Bahar Yürükoğlu: Brains in a Golden Gratin
Wyatt Resident Gallery, Upper Level
MoCA Arlington is pleased to present Brains in a Golden Gratin, a solo exhibition by resident artist Bahar Yürükoğlu, on view between January 20, and March 17, 2024. Titled after a dish from the 1982 cookbook Hors d’Oeuvre, Yürükoğlu’s exhibition takes the messy, often revolting stuff of our mortal bodies and transient lives, and searches for connections between them and ideals of beauty, motherhood, and civilization—all somehow (and indeed intimately) related to food—with gusto. At the core of Brains in a Golden Gratin is a new series of collages incorporating the artist’s own photographs or vintage postcards as the main support: these works do not attempt to tame culturally loaded concepts into a palatable dish for visual consumption. Instead, the immediacy of collage as a medium instantiates the chaos of Yürükoğlu’s cerebral processes of visual and logocentric ”thinking” and makes them available in perpetuity with all of their rough edges. The exhibition also includes an installation by the artist that reflects on the history of collage: just as this medium has typically oscillated between the high- and the low-brow, Yürükoğlu’s installation comprises an “expanded collage” stranded between the two- and the three-dimensional, creating a porous space where art and life can become more tangibly intertwined.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Bahar Yürükoğlu (b. 1981, Washington, D.C.) works with photography, installation, sculpture, and film in order to probe the boundaries between the human body with its environment, abstraction and kitsch, and the natural and the artificial, particularly through her experimentation with light and space. Selected solo shows include: Organ Panic, artSümer, Istanbul, 2019; Maybe I’d like to be like you, artSümer, Istanbul, 2017; Flow Through, ARTER, Istanbul, 2016; Self-Titled, Nesrin Esirtgen Collection, Istanbul, 2014; and Melting North, Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, MA, 2013. Selected group exhibitions include The Myth of Normal, MassArt Art Museum, Boston 2023; Vantage Point 7, Sharjah Art Foundation, 2019; Coalescence, Angra do Heroísmo Museum, Terceira, 2018; Glasgow International, 2018; and the 2013 Biennial, DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA. Among the residencies Yürükoğlu participated are: the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, Saratoga, WY, 2013; the Arctic Circle, Svalbard, the Arctic Circle, 2015; Kultivera, Tranås, Sweden, 2016; and Re_Act Contemporary, Azores, Portugal, 2018. Her work has been featured in such publications as Art Papers, Art Review, Art Review Asia, Art Unlimited, Hürriyet, as well as on online platforms including AnOthermag.com, and Hyperallergic. She is recipient of a 2018 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, as well the 2022 and 2024 DC Commission of the Arts and Humanities Fellowship. She earned her MFA in Interrelated Media from the Massachusetts College of Art & Design, Boston (2011) and her BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts, New York (2003). She lives in Washington D.C on Piscataway and Nacotchtank land.
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