Background
Sidar Baki was born in 1981 in Diyarbakir, Turkey.
Sidar Baki
Istanbul, Turkey
In 2008 Sidar Baki graduated from Marmara University. He studied at the Atatürk faculty of education in art teaching department.
Findikli, Istanbul, Turkey
Sidar Baki is studying master degree in painting department at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University
Sidar Baki
Sidar Baki
Sidar Baki was born in 1981 in Diyarbakir, Turkey.
In 2008 Sidar Baki graduated from Marmara University. He studied at the Atatürk faculty of education in art teaching department. He is studying master degree in painting department at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University.
In 2013, Sidar Baki left Istanbul to become an art teacher in Şanliurfa. He was already painting then, but had yet to conceive of the recurring figure of children, who now appear in his works. They serve to affix the eye within his postindustrial cityscapes, turning the derelict soil of construction sites into private zones fertile with preservations of life and vision characteristic of the preadolescent imagination. These children who are playing on their own are separated from the environment. Even though the image that is established between the spaces and the children is actually a child on his/her own, a reference is made to the human being who is lonely, stationary, lost and abandoned.
Baki paints scenes of neglected urban spaces as repurposed to shelter children who play in them with an exploratory innocence, skipping rope as in "Nowhere 17" (2019), in which a trio of uniformed schoolgirls leap in time above the floors covered in street chalk, patterned after games like hopscotch and tic-tac-toe. "Nowhere 10" (2019) evokes impressionistic naturalism. Its expansive Mesopotamian landscape is foregrounded by three boys on an empty soccer field. The greens of the grass and blues of the sky are subdued under wispy, disappearing cloud cover. There are badlands in the background of the minimal scene that contrasts the claustrophobic experience of confinement that the artist endured in Turkey's southeast, and that he knows as a resident of an impoverished, inner city neighborhood in Istanbul.
The paintings of Baki invite people into an intimate, visual space to witness the afterlife of urbanization. His wide canvases measure objective distance for viewers to examine the solemn themes of multigenerational disconnection and internal displacement. He animates the unsung netherworlds of city life that are utterly unavoidable for most urban-dwellers, even in brief moments of reprieve at an art gallery. His settings are isolated fantasies of the underground, placed in a pedagogical context through which to view and critique the present conditions of civilization.
Sidar Baki's realist tact in the manner of a scrawled chalkboard is reminiscent of Cy Twombly, whose scribbled gestures are permanently exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, next to Rothko and Pollock.
Quotations: "The conditions and situations that make up my work environment and the problems faced by children in many parts of the world lay the foregrounds for my paintings. Since, both these children and my students play a major role in my paintings. As they became a part of my life they became a part of my paintings too. I can say that watching my students painting, sharing their excitement with them, having limited opportunities, playgrounds taken from their hands, concreteization, degradation but the mentality of still being a child who resists all this deeply affects me. Observing the children focus their energies towards painting and the joy in their eyes when they see what they have created is admirable. What more is that they accomplish this despite their environment. The polluted outer world became a part of my paintings as; the unreliable, sometimes bleak, sometimes doomed place. These children who disregard these uncanny places play their games with all their purity, they continue to do their paintings, and maybe they even take shelter in these places. These places, where movement, work and all kinds of precession are present, leave their place to a deep silence in the paintings and the painting becomes a picture of everywhere and nowhere".