Neal Baer Collection

Murat Önen (b. 1993, Istanbul) lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany. His practice destabilizes the definitional fixity of painting, often by redefining tropes of masculinity.Me and the Yellow Void can be seen as a self-portrait of the artist confronting painting’s legacy. Originally exhibited as a diptych with Önen’s homage to Michiel Sweerts’s The Drawing School (c. 1650s), Me and the Yellow Void’s solitary artist stands in contrast to the group of the school, suggested here as reckoning what to do with all of that training he received.

While the intensity of the yellow and ochre colors recall the sublime of J. M. W. Turner, at the work’s center is a circle of untouched white paper. The new horizons of unsettled academisms, and Önen’s own work, are yet to be written.

Provenance

Edouard Montassut, Paris

Exhibitions

“I will grow my own private”, Edouard Montassut, Paris, 3 September – 4 October 2025

See also

Murat Onen at Max Mayer https://maxmayer.net/artists/murat-onen