Hakan Pehlivan.
Artist, curator and director of the Paper Artists Association (KSD), living and working in Ankara, Turkey.
Tidal — pigment on canvas. Studio, Ankara.
Hakan Pehlivan lives and works in Ankara as an artist, curator and director of the Paper Artists Association (KSD). Across more than three decades his practice has moved freely between painting and sculpture, always returning to a single preoccupation: how ordinary materials — pigment, paper, air — can be made to hold feeling.
Originally trained in graphic and art education, he works across installation, paper objects, drawing, painting, digital print and video. His pigment paintings let colour pool and stain of its own accord, while his paper works — rolled, woven, and folded from printed pages — turn the discarded ephemera of daily life into quiet architecture.
His “Made in Turkey” project, shown in Berlin and Kayseri, used paper objects scattered through industrial and transitional spaces to reflect on labour, migration and national identity. Alongside his studio practice he curates exhibitions and leads the KSD, championing paper as a serious contemporary medium.
Education
Selected exhibitions
Awards
“I work where the made meets the found — pigment that pools of its own will, paper folded into forms that remember the hand.”Artist statement