ŞEVKET SÖNMEZ'S "DRINK VAN HOUTEN CACAO İÇİNİZ" EXHIBITION AT MERKUR 

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Gallery Merkur opens its doors at its new location with Sevket Sonmez’s new exhibition titled ''Drink Van Houten Cacao İçiniz''.

Sevket Sonmez’s exhibition is based on and inspired by an incident which was reflected at first in newspaper headlines in 1910 and later in Mayakovsky’s poems.

At one of the last guillotine executions open to public, the Van Houten Company had offered to pay money to the convict in return for his shouting Van Houten’s brand slogan right before his death by decapitation; and the convict had accepted this offer.

In the beginning of the 20th century - a period marked by hope for the future - Mayakovsky calls to mind in his poem titled “A Cloud in Trousers” this man who shouts “Drink Van Houten Cacao” right before blood gushes forth from his throat.

Sevket Sonmez translates this slogan into street language by giving it a hybrid form. According to him, today individual tragedies serve as the props for a general state of weariness and demoralization. The ghosts of the twentieth century are walking among us.

In his exhibition, the artist re-creates on a new surface such binaries as memory-history, technology-nature and human skin-metal by pulling them out of the void in which they clash continuously and by also using the images left from Mayakovsky.

In opposition to the viewpoint which sees history as a grand “pessimism mythology” and life as an effort to reconcile with this, these paintings – in which the figure of the poet transforms into wild beasts and the piles of metal into exotic flowers – clearly have a “sublimatory” function for the artist.

The exhibition of the artist, who combines a diverse range of stylistic approaches as well as different techniques, is composed of large size watercolour, acrylic and oil paintings and it can be visited at MERKUR between 5 and 22 October.