SANATORIUM presents İsmail Şimşek’s solo exhibition titled Monokrom from November 12 to December 26, 2026. The exhibition approaches monochrome through the constancy underlying multicolored surfaces; it examines the fragile balance created by color, line, and material along the boundary between pictorial order and sculptural construction.
In the history of modern art, the monochrome represents a radical threshold where painting is stripped of representation, narrative, and chromatic diversity to retreat into its own material and conceptual boundaries. While Malevich’s Black Square opened a new point of departure for painting with its unicolor surface, Rodchenko’s red, yellow, and blue monochrome works pushed this logic of reduction to the medium's outermost limits. The monochrome thus became not merely a color preference, but a historical stance interrogating what painting could be and what it could exclude while continuing to exist.
İsmail Şimşek’s exhibition Monochrome inherits this legacy by subverting the purity of a single color. In this sense, the exhibition presents an inventory of a colorful, tense surface investigation that the artist has engaged with in recent years: one that deconstructs modernism’s ideal of “purification through a single color.” In Şimşek’s practice, monochrome points to an underlying constancy beneath a multicolored surface. Here, color ceases to serve as a direct signifier of vitality; instead, it becomes an element that exposes the distance between appearance and the underlying reality.
Şimşek’s engagement with material is rooted in a structural way of thinking informed by his training in sculpture. His surfaces bring together Piet Mondrian’s pictorial order and Naum Gabo’s constructivist spatial conception onto a shared ground where line and color materialize. This approach stages an encounter between two distinct functions assigned to the line by modernism on the very same surface. In Mondrian, the line is a boundary that delineates color planes and establishes pictorial order; in Gabo, it ceases to be descriptive and turns into a structural element that makes the direction of force and spatial relations visible. The networks the artist constructs across the canvas invert the delineating, dividing logic of classical abstraction. In Şimşek’s work, the line transforms into a material cord, uniting the functions of “separating” and “binding” within a single body. Rather than a resolved harmony, the equilibrium he establishes across the surface is a fragile moment, one constantly renegotiated and liable to rupture at any instance.
Beyond being a mere optical value added to the surface, Şimşek approaches color as a tangible element that stretches, is woven, resists tension, and directly contributes to the embodiment of form. Rather than receding, color proliferates; monochromatic grounds are fractured, stretched, bound, and reconnected with cords, fabrics, and narrow webbings. The forms Şimşek generates through cords and knots operate between Mondrian’s and Gabo’s conceptions of the line: as they partition the surface, they link its components together, delineating color planes while simultaneously generating physical tension. The line thus shifts from a representational sign into a material vector of force, while color evolves from a merely visual property into one of the structure’s load-bearing relationships. In this regard, Şimşek’s works are constructed on the boundary between pictorial space and sculptural form, a threshold where nothing settles definitively into place. In the artist’s words, everything coexisting also bears the potential to disperse, and balance is merely “a ‘present moment’ whose calibration has not yet faltered.” Colorful surfaces render this moment seemingly vital and harmonious, yet they do not dissolve the underlying tension. Şimşek’s distinction between being colorful and appearing colorful emerges precisely here: like any seemingly vibrant order, this moment exists only as long as it lasts.
About the Artist:
İsmail Şimşek was born in Izmir in 1977. He graduated at the top of his class from the Department of Sculpture at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Dokuz Eylül University, where he subsequently earned his Master’s degree in the Department of Art and Design.
In his sculptural practice, Şimşek seeks to reflect on how form is perceived, cultivating an approach open to experimenting with diverse materials without adhering to standardized formats. His formal explorations focus on human existence, directing the individual both toward and beyond their origin, as well as their experience of space and time.
The artist draws upon the dual realities he perceives, internal and external, as psychological phenomena. The repetitive act of generating form in Şimşek’s work problematizes the reciprocal relationship between external reality and inner consciousness, serving an ongoing quest for personal meaning and equilibrium.