Galeri Nev İstanbul is celebrating its 40th anniversary with an exhibition series spanning 18 months. The first exhibition in the series brings together the works of Mike Berg and Nermin Er.
The exhibition brings the two artists’ practices together through their distinct approaches to materials and scale. Drawing inspiration from the cities they inhabit, architectural elements, and their surroundings, Berg and Er focus on processes of building, assembling, and transformation in their work. The lines of the city, the geometry of structures, surfaces, and everyday spatial experiences are reshaped through their individual visual languages.
For both artists, making is less a matter of representing a form than of reconstructing and transforming it through the possibilities offered by the material itself. Berg’s transitions between metal, paper, and various craft techniques, alongside Er’s layered worlds created by cutting, adding to, coloring, and superimposing paper, reveal different approaches to the act of making and building. Working across different scales, the two artists bring individual elements together to create new structures, surfaces, and spaces.
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Mike Berg takes the sphere, prism, and pyramid, some of the most fundamental geometric forms, as starting points, reinterpreting them through metal spirals and lines. Giving depth and new meaning to geometric forms that are deeply embedded in our visual memory, the artist transforms familiar shapes through his own visual language. Berg’s metal wall sculptures at times evoke patterns affixed to the surface of a wall. Curiosity about materials and a desire to explore their possibilities play a defining role in Berg’s practice. Reproducing his drawings and motifs through different materials, Berg also considers the new qualities that emerge through these transitions as an integral part of his process. During the years he lived in Turkey, the artist was influenced by the non-narrative, abstract expressive power of Eastern culture, drawing inspiration from its relationship with tradition and craft. For Berg, it is important that his works do not settle into a single, definitive meaning. By keeping his works open-ended, the artist allows for an unlimited potential that can be observed and interpreted by the viewer in the moment of encounter.
Nermin Er explores the limits and possibilities of materials, particularly paper and ink, in her practice. Having worked in the world of animation for many years, the artist continues to draw on this experience through light, shadow, movement, and time. Combining paper, which she uses with a minimalist approach, with light and shadow, she creates stories and cinematic scenes. Er approaches linear forms drawn from urban silhouettes sometimes as reliefs and sometimes as sculptures, reconfiguring her explorations of form developed across different periods of her practice. In her works, these forms can become the characters in a scene, elements of our living spaces, or hybrid entities that exist independently of either. In this way, the artist creates a space between the familiar and new encounters. Across works from her different series, Er introduces dimensionality to bring surface and volume together, developing a cohesive visual language in which individual elements come together to form a whole, much like fragments of a sentence combining to create a complete expression.
Once in 40 Years / Mike Berg & Nermin Er will be on view until 14 November.
Galeri Nev İstanbul is open Tuesday–Friday, 11:00–18:30, and Saturday, 12:00–18:30.
For further information and inquiries: info@galerinevistanbul.com
