Schicht Um Schicht

For the second time, the gallery Under The Mango Tree presents the Berlin artist Alper Emeklier (*1967). The solo exhibition, entitled Layer by Layer, explores the complexity of hybrid identity, with a focus on memories and longings that are shaped by the experience of migration, but cannot be attributed to it alone. On display is a range of paintings in oil on canvas that draw the viewer into Emeklier’s poetic perception of existence that come to life through his expressionist appropriation and exaggeration of the formalist concept of layering in painting.

The exhibition shows the oeuvre of an artist whose expression merges the figurative and the abstract. Alper draws inspiration for his work from the environments that accompany him in his life. For example, from the neighborhood around Kurfürstenstraße in Berlin-Schöneberg, which has undergone an extraordinary process of gentrification over the last 20 years. His works Two Women and a Fox and Green Garden archive a phenomenology of urban nature and urban sexuality that the majority of people living in Berlin have probably never experienced and will never experience.

The painter manages to convey his observations, experiences and thoughts visually and make them physically tangible. By creating visual relationships of iconographic allegories, for example between the works „ die Menschen“ and „Ein Schöner Ort“, visitors are invited to engage with Alper’s artistic examination of individual verses of the Koran and Islamic mysticism. Layer by layer, the exhibition thus guides visitors through a multidimensional experience.

Alper Emeklier was born in Turkey and has lived in Berlin, Germany since 1977. After completing his master’s degree in sculpture with Joachim Schmettau (1995) at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin (now Universität der Künste, UdK), an exchange at the École des Beaux Arts (1993) and a stay abroad in Chicago, he devoted himself to painting in 2007. His works have been exhibited at the renowned Kunsthalle Bonn (1996), among others. Today he lives and works in Berlin-Schöneberg.