Gökhan Taskin

Exhibition Playful Vessels - June-July 2019

Johan Van Loon and Gökhan Taskin

°1964

The artist got involved with ceramics in 1984 at the Hacettepe University in Ankara. He received a few years after his studies, a scholarship from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst to study product and ceramic design in Krefeld, University of Applied Sciences. In 2000 he was selected for Artist in Residence in EKWC s' Hertogenbosh, NL and in 2001 he had an Artist in Residence in ICC Skaelscor (ceramic research center) Denmark.
Gökhan is a polyvalent artist creating painting, photo and graphics. “I see my art as a multi-organism in which all parts support each other, especially in form and color”. ” In 1984 he saw for the first time the name “Johan Van Loon” on a poster of Rosenthal AG. The porcelain broches on the poster, which Johan designed at that time, inspired Gökhan to make a ceramic bas relief. The first real encounter with Van Loon however happened nine years later in Galerie Carla Koch in Amsterdam. He always felt like a “nomad”student and splits his work up in time periods. There is the Turkish era, the Dutch and German periods and a short Danish moment. “Different cultures, environments and societal feelings, generate different work”, Gökhan says. Since his naturalization as Dutch citizen however the “nomad” feeling disappeared. He became more interested in his own circumstances, his fellow men, and of course cultural and societal life in the Netherlands.”
Taskin works with clay, but in this way that it does not lose its specificities, its own language. The matter gets to his soul. “It is a material with endless opportunities, but also a material that carries its secrets and irritations.”
His recent work uses the mould-archive, in other words, the plaster moulds and plaster prints Johan Van Loon made of nature in his daily environment. It are structures the master kept to, one day, use in his work. Gökhan deconstructs and constructs these moulds and prints into unique new forms, more or less vessels. They become an abstraction of the archetypical container. He calls this series of work “Segmentation of Johan Van Loons structures”. Eventually they are an homage to the artist Van Loon. Taskin however is the author of other work, formed with hand build elements and parts of casted porcelain. Again he constructs, one can say composes, those elements into strong more or less geometrical sculptures. Glaze firing melt the individuals parts to one unity. In a way he followed the intuitive working process of his partner, letting things happen, spontaneously, but in the end realigning them in a kind of minimatrix of the Latin square.