Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine

Merve Morkoç’s Disturbing Paintings Turn Beauty Into Gore

Turkish artist Merve Morkoç aka Lakormis mocks our predilection for beauty with portraits that toy with our instincts and desires. Thin, young, model-like characters with the types of faces and bodies that line the pages of fashion magazines are her primary subjects. But Morkoç alters the women's appearances with disturbing, fantasy disfigurations that make them the stuff of nightmares. Initial attraction quickly becomes repulsion. Morkoç waves the illusion of beauty before the viewer's face and rips it away like a veil, revealing the strange, Frankenstein-esque details she has added to her characters.

Turkish artist Merve Morkoç aka Lakormis mocks our predilection for beauty with portraits that toy with our instincts and desires. Thin, young, model-like characters with the types of faces and bodies that line the pages of fashion magazines are her primary subjects. But Morkoç alters the women’s appearances with disturbing, fantasy disfigurations that make them the stuff of nightmares. Initial attraction quickly becomes repulsion. Morkoç waves the illusion of beauty before the viewer’s face and rips it away like a veil, revealing the strange, Frankenstein-esque details she has added to her characters.

Meta
Share
Facebook
Reddit
Pinterest
Email
Related Articles
Super Future Kid’s candy-colored paintings and sculptures fill Gallery Poulsen later this month with her new show, "Smells Like Teenage Armpit.” The artist says that all of the dimension-hopping paintings, crafted in acrylics and spraypaint, “started out as ideas I had just before falling asleep in my bed.” The show kicks off on Oct. 26 and runs through Nov. 16.
Swiss artist Urs Fischer, based in New York, adapts the human face into topographical forms in his paintings. Works like "Landscape," above, are crafted from aluminum panel, reinforced polyurethane foam, epoxy, acrylic ink, primer, paint, and silkscreen, and gesso. These paintings reorganize visages into landscapes, with the artist's own face used in differing ways. The recent show “Mind Moves,” erected at Gagosian Gallery in San Francisco, was accompanied by a quote from the artist: “At its core, art is all about order. When you're an artist, you basically arrange, rearrange, or alter; you play off order.”
Liam Barr explores our tendency to disrupt the natural world’s intentions in his surreal paintings. In particular, his recent series looks at how humans remove the horse from its backdrop and hold it as our own possessions. Further, one gallery says, “idea of symbolism reflecting an aura of pathos, displacement and insight into contemporary New Zealand life.”
With Nick Napoletano’s new interactive mural “Parallel,” the painting comes alive using live interactive projections. Napoletano worked with 3D artist Peter Godshall on the project, in which real-time user input technology allows viewers to affect what’s happening on the painted, two-sided visage and “experience augmented reality without the need for an external viewing device,” the artist says. (Napoletano was last featured on HiFructose.com here.)

Subscribe to the Hi-Fructose Mailing List