ANNA LAUDEL Düsseldorf

Lal Batman was born in 2001 in Bursa and spent her childhood moving between her hometown and Istanbul. She attended a high school with a fine art focus and upon graduating went on to study Plastic and Fine Arts at Yeditepe University (Istanbul). Throughout her studies she participated in curatorial projects, workshops, symposia and panels in Europe, Asia, and South America. For instance, the “IVth International Athens Art Symposium by UNESCO”, 2017 (Athens), an exhibition at “Boris Gorgiev and Varna City gallery”, 2017 (Varna), the “Repeat All Short Film Festival”, 2017 (Shumen), an exhibition at Galerie Da Vinci Art (Paris) and a project at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum, 2018 (Tokyo).

In 2017, Lal Batman was invited by Prof. Valeri Hristov Chakalov to attend the international film festival “Repeat All” organized by the Technological Education, Business and Visual Art Department of the Konstantin Preslavsky University of Shumen. In the context of the festival, she received an award for her work.
Lal Batman developed an interdisciplinary and multi-layered practice throughout her accelerating artistic career. Engaging with concepts that tie art and design together in their evolution over time, her visual language changed from more figurative representations to a more abstract style. Nonetheless the artist’s work retains a playful and often witty note. Batman’s perception of art and design is also of significance in terms of the relationship between space, artwork and audience she aims to create. Using video art, digital manipulation, digital illustration, sculpture and painting, Batman transforms her perspective on reality and its intrinsic volatile into complex pieces of art.

Invited by the Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture of MEF University (Istanbul) as a guest coordinator for their yearly workshop week in 2017, Lal Batman examined autonomous features of art and architecture practices as well as independent studios, that make use of the interrelationships of interdisciplinary networks. She coordinated the group exhibition “Love over Entropy” at Anna Laudel gallery in Istanbul in 2020.

In 2021 she started a multi-media-based research project with curator and sociologist Ebru Yetiskin, a collective process resulting in exhibitions across 250 former theatre and opera houses in Belgrade, as well as the artist’s solo exhibition “Exposé” at Anna Laudel gallery in Istanbul (February 2022).

In 2023 Anna Laudel represented her in a solo booth at Zonamaco, Mexico City. The booth was mentioned on Art news as one of the top ten booths of this fair ́s edition.

Born in Manisa in 1988, Ramazan Can graduated from Gazi University (name changed to Hacı Bayram Veli University), Faculty of Fine Arts, Department of Fine Arts Education in 2011. In 2015, he received his graduate degree in Painting at the Fine Arts Institute of Gazi University. He debuted with the solo show “Shamans and Demons” in 2015 at Gallery Foyart in Ankara. In the following year, two more exhibitions under the same theme were held in Ankara, both at hotel Houston and Tilky Gallery.

Shamanism and modern mysticism play a vital role in Can ́s work. He draws from Anatolian motifs, yet, he maintains a somewhat distanced relationship with those motifs and discerns them from their historic context when combining them with neo-expressionist elements. His work spans across painting, collage to neon light works and sculpture and though, not political in nature, one can read a certain narrative and commentary on history and modern society.

Can is to present day continuing his education at Gazi University within the Fine Arts Institute, though within the Program of Sufficiency in the Arts. Working and living in Ankara, he is currently lecturing at the Painting Department of the Faculty of Fine Arts at Ankara Hacı Bayram Veli University.

Anke Eilergerhard, Berlin based artist, is celebrated by critics for her worldwide unique, often humorous artistic stance. Her œuvre is cross-media, starting with painting, photography and video. She has become known for her sculptures, which are presented in numerous museums and at international art fairs. These balance virtuously between the boundaries of concrete sculpture, abstraction and figurative sculpture. They immediately catch the eye because of their daring compositions and their tactile and often intensely colored surfaces. Her trademark is the „Cream Hood“ out of Polyorganosiloxane.

"My observations and experiences are the basis of each of my works. For me, it is about making things visible that I cannot formulate in words, but are nonetheless universal. A layer cake with a whipped-cream swirl is a piece of heaven on earth. For me, the whipped-cream swirl is the perfect sculptural form. It has something cosmic about it. It reflects the yearning for Paradise. We live in an extremely visually fixated society, no sense can be deceived as thoroughly as the sense of vision.” Anke Eilergerhard.

The cake, as a metaphor for beauty, time, balance, longing, desire and deception, has had a prominent place in Eilergerhard's artistic work for more than three decades. She often works in cycles that pile up layer upon layer, almost biographically. Since 2004, she has focused on the sculptural form of the cream topping. From this she has developed her special artistic technique. Like a confectioner, she manually sculpts countless "cream hoods" from highly pigmented polyorganosiloxane (silicone) into a sculpture. Polyorganosiloxane, which is popular with DIY enthusiasts and plastic surgeons alike for correcting blemishes in appearance, is also the perfect art material for the artist in this context, in addition to its material nature. Yet it is an elaborate act of creation to precisely sculpt individual "cream hoods" en miniature by hand.
In Eilergerhard's latest works, with the title „BEETWEEN HEAVEN & EARTH, Istanbul“ and „KRAFTWERK (POWER WORK)“, although using the "vocabulary" typical of her work, strikingly new "texts" have emerged.
In 1994, she completed her artistic studies in communication design at Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Germany. 1999 moved to Berlin, Germany. 2017, the artist's spectacular sculptures achieved international renown, which she had created on behalf of Fendi for the luxury brand's global flagship stores in New York, Paris, Milan, Berlin, Dubai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Rome and Shanghai.
Anke Eilergerhard's artworks are exhibited and collected worldwide, including Abu Dhabi, Canada,
Chile, China, Dubai, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, the Principality of Liechtenstein, Spain, South Africa, Switzerland, Turkiye, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Upon his graduation from high school in Germany, Mathias Hornung completed an apprenticeship as a mechanic. In 1988 Hornung went on to study stage and costume design at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart-Weissenhof in the classes and workshops of Peter Grau and Jürgen Rose and earned his diploma in 1993. Hornung’s research related to his work explores the visual connection between traditional wood printing technology and digital order patterns. The materials primarily used by the artist are paper and wood. The pieces of wood discarded in the process of milling into it, is what he later uses in the printing process on paper. Following this technique he equates the printing and the tools used to print with one another.

Mathias Hornung has been living and working in Berlin since 1992. Between 2004 and 2007 he worked in Canada, Costa Rica, Elba/Italy and Indonesia, and featured in exhibitions in France, US, Canada, Belgium, Austria and South Africa.

Born in 1979 in Turkey, Ardan Özmenoğlu obtained her BFA as well as her MFA in the Department of Art, Design, and Architecture from Bilkent University, Ankara. She was an Artist in Residence at Kala art Institute in Berkeley, Ateliergemeinschaft Milchhof e.V. Berlin, Frans Maserell Centrum in Belgium, Kulturkontakt Austria in Vienna, and Glasstress in Murano, Venice. Her recent work consists of site-specific installations combining screenprints in various formats and on different media and materials such as glass, neon tubes and lights as well as post-it notes. Playing with the formats of printmaking and sculpture she creates three dimensional, almost architectural shapes. Her works can be found in important collections world wide, such as the Hort Collection NYC, Naked Heart Foundation, the Frankfurt Airport Collection, the Osthaus Museum Hagen Collection, the Kala Art Institute Collection, the Borusan Contemporary Art Collection, the UniCredit Bank Art collection, the Fondation Jan Michalski Collection, the Imoga Mundi (Benetton) Collection and the Istanbul Modern Collection.

One of the striking features of Özmenoğlu’s oeuvre is her use of images of both Turkish and global popular culture, as well as commonly used colloquial expressions, that the artist reverses into self-ironic, sometimes even critical statements. Her neon sign sculptures are either letterings of expressions used in everyday language in Turkish, or, if more figurative in nature, they portray simple objects one might find in their own home, such as a vase of flowers or a coat rack with hangers. Özmenoğlu captures the fast changing, chaotic, and sometimes burdening reality of our present-day world. The information overload, the multi-facetted realities created by digitalization, she captures it all in sometimes almost endearing manner, yet always with an ironic subtext. Though arguably biographical in nature, Ardan Özmenoğlu sets an universal example of the artistic examination of national and cultural identity, individuality, and collective visual memory.

Ardan Özmenoğlu lives and works in Yeniköy, Istanbul.

Daniele Sigalot was born in Rome, in 1976. He started his creative career in the advertising field, working for leading agencies in Italy, Spain, and the UK. In 2007 he left the agency Saatchi & Saatchi London to fully dedicate himself to an artistic project he had founded with Fabio La Fauci in 2005 called ‘Blue&Joy’ - The project’s name became an om de plume of the Sigalot/LaFauci duo, a collaboration which continued until 2013. One year later the duo dissolved their artistic and creative partnership and Daniele Sigalot went on to pursue a solo career, focusing on mixed media installations. At the heart of his working process and conception lies the ambiguity between the physical nature and the perception of the materials he uses. His work is as much illusional as it is ironic. In 2022 he debuted with the solo show "Master of Mistakes" at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome.
Sigalot ran a workshop in Berlin between 2010 and 2018, which he almost self-ironically called “La Pizzeria”. In January 2019, he moved his studio to Naples. As of January 2023 he moved “La Pizzeria” to Rome, where he has since then been living and working.