"Dua"
Two exhibitions by Peter Hristoff

Co-sponsored by the Moon and Stars Project

"Dua": The Rugs
September 19 - October 4, 2005
The Hagia Sophia Museum
Sultanahmet, 34400 Istanbul
Tel: 212 528 4500

"Dua": The Paintings
September 22 - October 22, 2005
C.A.M. Gallery Sehbender Sokak, No: 4
Asmalimescit, Tunel, 34430 Istanbul Tel: 212 245 7975

For press release & high resolution pictures, please click...

In 1997, I started a series of drawings that were based on my assumptions of what people pray for and why they pray. I eventually turned these drawings into a suite of serigraph prints entitled “Ten Prayers”, which I exhibited in my first one-man show in Istanbul at the Yapi Kredi Cultural Center Kazim Taskent Art Gallery in September 1998. These works led to a series of larger “rug” pieces done on rice paper, which combined the motifs I was using in my paintings (masks, birds, skulls, stylized flowers, cosmological symbols and figures) with the formal structure of Anatolian carpets.

My interest in rugs halis (rugs) and kilims was a natural connection to the journal-like quality of my work. I was fascinated by the diarist elements in traditional Turkish carpet making—the weaver incorporating events, personal beliefs, hopes and desires with regional (traditional) symbols into their work—an approach I took (and am still taking) to my art making.

In 2000, I began to work on rug-inspired prints in which I would daily complete a horizontal band of the composition recording my interests, personal mythologies and artistic pre-occupations. I always had the intention of eventually creating actual halis and kilims in Turkey. I was particularly fascinated by the notion of the seccade (prayer rug), an object which creates a sacred space wherever it is placed—an object charged with hope and spiritual connections as well as a physical relationship to the body and to geography. The ritual of placement, of prayer and absolution, all tap into the issues I’ve been addressing in my paintings since the early 1980s. These rugs were all woven in Usak, Turkey, one of the oldest weaving centers in Anatolia, by the women of Simav village.

Hagia Sophia’s history as the greatest of Byzantine churches, and subsequently a mosque makes it an ideal site to display works dealing with the notions of prayer and praying. Interestingly, a show at the Hagia Sophia Museum is a way through which I am returning “home” to Turkey. I was born in Istanbul; my family left Turkey when I was five years old. My paternal grandfather (also an artist) had immigrated to Istanbul from Bulgaria in 1926, and was a close friend of Ali Sami Boyar, the first director of the Museum. Boyar was also a friend and mentor to my father during the years that the young Hristoff studied at the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts (now Mimar Sinan University). Exhibiting at Hagia Sophia connects me to this legacy. Despite the emigration of the family, a tradition of painting that references the homeland prevails.

In this period of global chaos, sorrow and disorder, I place hope (salvation?) in spirituality, in the mysterious unknown, and in the power and order of the universe. The seccade is an object of sacred ritual, of contemplation and of decoration. In many ways, paintings function as seccades for me, providing a separate place to contemplate, a place of isolation. The paintings and works on paper on exhibition at C.A.M. Gallery reflect many of the same issues addressed with the rug series—hope, desire, a reaching towards spiritual enlightenment as well as our physical and carnal attachments to this beautiful, often frightening and abundant life. ”Bright sadness”, a term I came upon in the Patriarch Bartholomew’s statement for the “Byzantium - Faith and Power” catalog most accurately describes my interests. He writes: “This refers to a mixed emotion of joy, over the anticipated help from God and Salvation, and sorrow, for the suffering of life and sin.”

Peter Hristoff