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14 Famous Women/ Sébastien Gökalp Painting 24.11.1998-20.12.1998

"Vraiment le bleu connait la couleur d'orange, vraiment la main son ombre sur le mur (...) Toute chose qui est, de toutes parts, désigne cela sans quoi elle n'aurait pu etre." Paul Claudel My paintings generally make a reference to the photographic image. They deal with photographs which have already been published in the press or were taken with disposable cameras. This indicates that the paintings do not have a great pictorial value. What I actually try to convey through my paintings is the "disturbing estrangement" and the distress of daily life. The series "Fourteen Famous women", which was displayed at Dulcinea, consist of 15, 75x 100 cm. canvases done between January 1996 and September 1998. The images present famous women , Adalet Ağaoğlu, Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Elizabeth II, Gisele Freud, Juliette Greco, Irene Joliot-Curie, Frida Kahlo, Joan Mitchell, Jeanne Moreau, Tezer Özlü, Christine Pascale, Marthe Robert, through a part of their body from which you can try to guess the name. The question of identity is the center of this series. They are women (I am the opposite sex), they are artists (Do I belong to that group?). They are the subjects of a project of portraits with which you can identify since none of them have a face. The photographic and mechanical aspect of the paintings carries this project which could have reflected my own identity (style, expression ) elsewhere. These paintings also play with the slipperiness of meaning: they are women, (generally the famous people are male) and the portraits do not have faces which makes the person unrecognizable. These are creative women (writers, painters, filmmakers, actrisses) and you see thier hands with which they write, create art, make films, and you see their hips with which they gave birth, but the faces in which you search for the expression of the genius are absent . These representations are much larger than life size, but they were taken from very small pictures from newspaper articles. The series resemble Gerhard Richter's 48 portraits of famous men inspired by Andy Warhol's 1964 Guggenheim exhibition, Thirteen Most Wanted Men. Richter presented men chosen randomly from an illustrated encyclopedia. I, on the other hand, chose to reverse this process by working with women deliberately chosen according to their work. Sébastien Gökalp

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