Rüçhan Şahinoğlu’s ninth solo exhibition, “Outside,” will be on view at Galeri Apel from 27 October to 3 December, 2011. In his new show, Şahinoğlu brings to an urban setting his chief themes of non-communication, solitude and alienation. The paintings this time feature deserted streets, soulless building fronts, tension-charged electricity transformers, and above all isolated street lamps.

The fundamental iconographic element of the artist’s most recent period, the street lamps stand as witnesses to the city’s high-speed, noisy, overambitious flow.Since 1996 Rüçhan Şahinoğlu has been sending postcards from various cities in Turkey and the world to his address in Istanbul, and the innate solitude in this years-long performance, together with the existential game it implies, are expressed in the pictures at his new exhibition. Blending the hundreds of city photographs he has taken, the artist has obtained original urban aspects and thus achieved new views which become city images which are no place but simply the product of mental fictions. In these placeless urban images with no sense of belonging one may find, on the one hand, the profound abstract marks and atmosphere of the human spirit which in the process of urbanization and modernization is plagued by solitude and, on the other hand, the cold superficiality of virtual environments. An important dimension of Şahinoğlu’s pictures are the changing meanings and forms of city life and existence.As labor-intensive pictures nevertheless based on the photographic image, the works of Rüçhan Şahinoğlu at the same time ask, in a world besieged by photography, whether the visual can still give pleasure, question being put in terms of a meditative visual experience.