Artopol Gallery is pleased to present Batıkan Bostancı’s first solo exhibition, “Direction in Deadlock, Form in Impasse,” on view from 4–30 December 2025. Bringing together a comprehensive selection that reflects the artist’s production and creative journey over the past ten years, the exhibition features sculptures, reliefs, paintings, and digital works. In a period when both the individual and the social structure have lost their sense of direction, the exhibition offers a compelling inquiry into where and how meaning can be reconstructed.
Born in 1991 in Uşak, Bostancı strengthened his early practice in hand modeling and drawing through his education at Fine Arts High School and the Sculpture Department of Anadolu University. His studio experiences in Antalya and Istanbul played a significant role in shaping his technical and conceptual development. In particular, his years-long assistantship with two prominent figures of Turkish contemporary art, Bahadır Baruter and İrfan Önürmen, was instrumental in forming Bostancı’s interdisciplinary approach and distinctive aesthetic language. During his time in Önürmen’s studio, Bostancı not only refined his production methods but also deepened his conceptual thinking and developed a form of figurative abstraction intertwined with architectural sensibility. This foundation directly informs his unique works, which balance the strength and solidity of sculpture with the lightness of line, merging architectural plan aesthetics with a figurative abstract vocabulary.
“Direction in Deadlock, Form in Impasse” focuses on the points of tension and intersection between opposing concepts such as scarcity–abundance, captivity–freedom, mutation–transformation. The labyrinth-like surfaces Bostancı constructs through linear weavings read less as portraits than as structural traces of an inner map. Each line ceases to be a boundary and instead becomes a shifting, dividing, or reuniting flow. The forms that emerge within this flow carry both the weight of an impasse and the potential of a beginning. While the warm color fields intensify emotional resonance, the gray and neutral zones point to the turbulent and often unstable nature of the external world. Architectural thinking is evident in Bostancı’s compositions: as layers stack upon each other, voids and passages come together to form a plan of a mental space. When confronted with these structures, the viewer encounters not merely an image but a system waiting to be unraveled, traced, and reinterpreted.
“Direction in Deadlock, Form in Impasse” presents an intense and refined cross-section of Bostancı’s practice, in which psychological depth, geometric construction, and figurative abstraction coexist within the same structure. The exhibition reminds us that a deadlock is not only a moment of confinement, but also a threshold where form may be rebuilt anew.