Yuksel Arslan: Visual Interpretations
Presented by The Drawing Center      

Friday, April 18 - Thursday, May 15, 2008

Opening Reception: Thursday, April 17, 2008
6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Gallery Talk: Saturday, April 19, 4:00 pm

Gallery hours: Tuesday through Friday, 10:00 am - 6:00 pm and Saturday, 11:00 am - 6:00 pm (closed Sundays and Mondays).

Drawing Room
40 Wooster Street
(Between Broome and Grand Streets)
New York, NY 10013

Free Admission

For additional information please contact Lisa Gold at 212-219-2166 or visit www.drawingcenter.org
 		 The Drawing Center is pleased to present Yüksel Arslan: Visual Interpretations, the first U.S. exhibition of the Turkish-born, Paris-based artist Yuksel Arslan. Culled from Arslan’s personal collection, the exhibition will feature 27 drawings and two of the artist’s preparatory notebooks. Spanning from 1958 to the present, the works will include representative pieces from the artist’s seven major series: Phallisme 2, Artures, Capital, Influences, Autoartures, L’Homme, and New Influences.

Each series comprises hundreds of drawings on subjects ranging from schizophrenia, the eroticism of Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille, and Antonin Artaud, to visual interpretations of the artists, poets, writers, scientists, musicians, and philosophers who have influenced his thinking. By presenting a selection from each major series, the exhibition will provide an overview of the artist’s oeuvre and will explore Arslan’s highly personal approach to art-making.

Employing a process he developed and perfected in 1955, Arslan produces colors by mixing raw pigments with his own saliva, blood, urine, and other organic materials like honey, earth, and egg whites. For the past sixty years, Arslan has been mining the depths of the unconscious mind, bringing together western and eastern aesthetics and philosophy in finely wrought works that he calls “Artures.”

Yüksel Arslan: Visual Interpretations is curated by Executive Director Brett Littman. The Drawing Center will present a free gallery talk by Brett Littman about the artist on Saturday, April 19.

Accompanying Yüksel Arslan: Visual Interpretations will be Drawing Papers 78, a full-color, 24-page edition of The Drawing Center's publication series. Drawing Papers 78 will contain text by Ferit Edgü, images of works in the exhibition, and an essay by Brett Littman.

This exhibition is made possible, in part, by The American Turkish Society.

Additional support is provided by members of the Drawing Room, a patron circle founded to support innovative exhibitions presented in The Drawing Center’s project gallery: Devon Dikeou, Mr. and Mrs. Henry R. Kravis, Jill Lear, Judith Levinson Oppenheimer, Louisa Stude Sarofim, Elizabeth Tops and Arnie Lizan, John C. Whitehead, and Isabel Stainow Wilcox.

The Drawing Center’s 2007–2008 exhibitions and public programs are made possible, in part, with the generous support of the Carnegie Corporation, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, and with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State agency.