Biography
Çınar Eslek was born in Tunceli, Turkey in 1976. Upon completing her undergraduate studies at Mimar Sinan University, Fine Arts Faculty, Painting Department in 2006 she achieved a Master of Arts degree at Marmara University, Fine arts Faculty in 2008. As well as painting she is involved in visual art, both photograpy and video.
Following her studies, she started working with İstanbul’s Pi Artworks and had five solo exhibitions with the gallery. She has had a significant number of group exhibitions from 2005 to date both in Turkey and abroad including, St-art 14th European Contemporary Art Fair in Strasbourgh in 2009 and "Sexpression", Association of Fine Artists of Macedonia and N.U. Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje, Macedonia and "Encounters, Turkish Contemporary Art in Korea” in Seou in 2012. She received the 25th Aksanat Contemporary Artist Award in 2006 and Rotary Club Young Artist Award in 2009. She also joined the residence program Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris.
Çınar Eslek is an artist who is known for using different mediums like painting, video and photograph in her works. The artist’s principal problematic in her works is the body and the spirituality. The body’s characteristic of having the ability of fertility and the ability of decay in the same time fascinates and improves the artist. Such a weakness of the bbody brings the artist to the concept of identity out of the body. Any how the body exists and perishes, the identity with a similar destiny is a symbol of temporality for Eslek. To escape from the mediocrity of the temporality, the human or the chaotic essennce that doesn’t even need to be named as human should be recalled. This poetic attitude which is another form of bringinng the space in to a surface, is the basis of the spirituality of Eslek’s works. The artist doesn’t get lost in the imaginary circle of spirituality because she has already experienced herself in her own life, the violence of the concepts of body and identitiy that she challenges with the spirituality. As a result, Çınar Eslek seeks for an escape in the time line of the contemporary art and tries to chase on this escape line an integral and cosmic perception of art which is away from representation.
