ART CITIES: N.York-Melis Buyruk

Melis Buyruk is a Turkish artist born in Golcuk in 1984. Her large-scale floral ceramic sculptures depart from contained, categorical forms of pottery, and celebrates the traditionally feminized discipline. Buyruk graduated from the Ceramic Department of the Faculty of Fine Arts at Selcuk University in 2007, and has exhibited across Turkey.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Leilla Heller Gallery

The exhibition “Habitat: Bloom” showcases seventeen porcelain works by Melis Buyruk, where a ceramic topography of intricate flora and fauna are encased in wooden boxes, and granted their own habitat. In a mastery of porcelain, the traditionally feminized and overlooked art form associated with domestic life is reinterpreted as a medium that points to bio-futurist tensions. Marking Buyruk’s first exhibition in New York, “Habitat: Bloom” presents the first viewing of the Turkish artist’s large-scale works. Allowing for the deeper immersion into Buyruk’s intricate and delicate porcelain world, the larger works create for a more commanding visual confrontation with Buyruk’s hybrid flower forms. Buyruk identifies and subtly blends patterns of vegetation and the natural world, creating porcelain flower fields. They are disorienting, as they evoke both artificiality and illusion in a play on logic. While strikingly realistic and incredibly meticulous, the porcelain flowers are unfeasibly monochrome, hybrid, and eerily level, suggesting an alien environment. Lit up, and enclosed in a box, the work is further imbued with notions of the fantastical. Fluctuating between boundaries of reality and surreality, the show reminds the viewer of our fractured and disjointed relationship with nature, and provokes a double consciousness. Drawn to the poetic fragility of porcelain, and the physical engagement it required, Buyruk became a specialist in the craft at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Selcuk University. Buyruk’s reintroduction of the material in contemporary context, recognizing and manipulating its ability to uncannily mimic organic forms, saw the artist be exhibited across Turkey.

Photo: Melis Buyruk, The Iguana, 2020, Porcelain, 18k Gold Decorated, Epoxy Clay, Wood, 57 x 52 cm / 22.4 x 20.5 in, © Melis Buyruk, Courtesy the artist and Leilla Heller Gallery

Info: Leilla Heller Gallery, 17 East 76th Street (off Madison Avenue), New York, NY, USA, Duration: 21/7-2/9/2022, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.leilahellergallery.com