Ekrem Yalcindag - Kai Middendorff Gallery

We were at the Kai Middendorff Gallery in Frankfurt. On show at ART COLOGNE 2023 is a painting by a Turkish artist who has developed a very special painting technique.

Galerie Kai Middendorf from Frankfurt/Main attaches great importance to the uniqueness of the artists it represents and their attitudes. Mr. Middendorf owes his invitation to ART COLOGNE 2023 to this positioning.

Ekrem Yalcindag - Turkish artist with a unique painting technique

He represents the Turkish artist Ekrem Yalcindag, who has a painting technique that is not represented anywhere else on the art market. The curator Robert Scheck said of the artist's painting style "you can't really paint like that", because Ekrem Yalcindag applies the paint for his paintings with a miniature brush. He began his career by studying in Turkey and then at the Städel School in Frankfurt. The artist's works show a mixture of oriental and western approaches to painting.

Master student of the Austrian painter Hermann Nitsch

Mr Middendorf demonstrates this with a large painting by the artist from the Kunstforum in Vienna, for whose huge exhibition rooms he had to revolutionize his painting technique. A single circular detail of the large format would have taken a whole day to paint using the previous method and it would not have been possible to fill the rooms with it. Ekrem Yalcindag therefore came up with the idea of pressing wooden slats onto the canvas and then using screen printing to transfer a kind of high-contrast photograph onto the canvas. In this way, he was able to incorporate the theme of nature in multiple ways. The painting combines the Orient with the Western, gestural painting of the rest of the picture surface, as known from Jackson Pollock, for example, through the meticulously worked out circle with the finest brush. The artist Ekrem Yalcindag was also a master student of the Austrian painter Hermann Nitsch, which is echoed in his work as an homage. The exhibit on show at ART COLOGNE can be seen as a quantum leap by the artist.