Mehmet Üskül was born in Bursa, Turkey in 1986. He gained Bachelor of Arts degree in 2013 from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, which is Turkey's oldest and most prestigious art training institution. In addition, he completed a pedagogy formation education at the same university in 2015. He gave well-structured painting lessons to both children and adults in various centers for many years in order to develop art perception and painting skills in society. In this way, he involved in diverse social responsibility projects. Beside participating in numerous group exhibitions, he had his first solo exhibition titled "Roots" in Istanbul in June 2020. The exhibition made a name for itself in national newspapers and art news websites. In the summer of 2022, his artwork named "Blending in" was exhibited in "The Fickle Mirror" exhibition at the Academy Art Museum (Maryland, USA), making him an internationally recognized artist.

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Currently, Mehmet Üskül lives in Washington DC and works as a juried resident artist in his own studio at the Torpedo Factory Art Center (Virginia, USA).

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“The main point of my work is on the concept of time as " moment ". My aim with this concept is to use a single moment or moments; to bring them together with different perspectives on the same ground. In my works, I bring various surfaces side by side, modulate distinct parts of objects and field images such as sky / ground with a metaphysical depth, use cold-warm color harmony together creating a perception of different areas, and place these color spots sometimes as sharp geometric shapes, mostly random but always with an intuitive arrangement.

 

The nature that I have included in almost each one of my compositions is, for me, the subject of all the stories that can be worked on. Nature is so miraculous, so wise, so full of surprises that I believe that its expression in painting or in a different branch of art is just a momentary expression. My primary motivation in my work is to focus on these moments, to give clues to the audience about different moments through impressions, and to design all the scenes and species that belong to nature and are unexplored. The structures that we see in my "Forest" series, hidden behind a crowd or object like corridor - panel - light, point to the unknown beyond the composition that appears in the picture, the surprising structure of nature.”

 

On the following pages, you can see a selection from my "Forest" and my other ongoing series. My ongoing works consist of figurative compositions as in my works named 'Hedonism' and 'Herd'.

n my work, I explore the concept of time through the metaphor of the forest. The changing time is best exemplified through the transformation and the cycle of death and rebirth observed in nature. Much like a forest, an individual, with all of their complex webs, intertwined ecosystems, and expanding roots, can change and grow.

 In my latest series, titled “Which Roots?” I explore the relationship between the figure and their environment, their transformation and adaptation to their new geography, and the politics of seeing and being seen as a newcomer and an immigrant. As I long to feel a sense of belonging, I reflect on my muscle memory of blending in. In my current works, the figures are pictured in lush, rich forest settings with lots of change, and their resilience is evident through their metaphoric relationship with the environment.

 

This project I am currently creating is called ‘’Which Roots’’.