Mehmet Ali Uysal

Mehmet Ali Uysal was born in Turkey in 1976. He creates large scale installations that are integrated into the material of the building they are situated in, transforming the venue and altering both the viewer’s perception of the space as well as how they move around it. His work titled 'Skin 2' was chosen by the Independent as one of the top ten public works of all times. Today, the process of creating, exhibiting, and perceiving contemporary art is deeply intertwined with the austere, white walled gallery space that continuously erases traces of its history in order to look perfect and untouched. Uysal wants to invert this tradition and revive the gallery space as a living entity by interfering directly in the structure of the white cube and deconstructing both its formal characteristics and inherited traditions.

Uysal’s recent 'Peel' series creates the illusion that the claddings of a gallery’s walls has become like the skin of a dissected body that is malleable enough to be literally pinched, ripped and torn off. In other recent work, he takes other common facets of the gallery space and similarly turns them from architectural limitations into the material, form, and content of the work that is the focus of attention. In Suspended, picture frames that traditionally function as a border to mark the limits of a work of art, lose this function and instead becomes a contorted and deformed specimen, hung on the wall for appraisal like a caught animal.