It is not a given that an artist gives us insight into his soul and mind. In his major exhibition "Love and Death" at Lachenmann Art Frankfurt, Deniz Alt does just that: He invites us into his innermost being. We experience his secret longings, the forbidden, the repressed, desires and cravings.
As a German-Turk with Armenian roots, Deniz Alt is a seeker. Since 1999 he has been dealing with Turkish-Armenian history, and does not want to accuse with his pictures and installations, but sees the core task of art as public remembrance. With touching portraits of women, Deniz Alt addresses the massacre of the Armenians; his women are contemporary witnesses, beauties with whom he counters the horror with love. "Armenia is a bridge to the world beyond our dreams...Armenia is the love of the world...among people...in the art of survival..." Deniz Alt writes in his diary. The weapons of the modern age are manipulation and fake news. Deniz Alt's new works are therefore responses to a complex world and to a trivialization of the culture of remembrance. The three cultural circles in which Deniz Alt has moved all his life are inhomogeneous and complex, although they are forever intertwined by terrible events. The tensions that develop here drive Alt's work and influence the intensity of the themes he addresses: life and growing up in Germany, family ties to Turkey, Armenian roots.
Many of his works are being exhibited publicly for the first time. Pictures that were deliberately not hung up are leaning against the walls. Viewers are allowed to touch them. Stacked pictures that represent what accumulates in our souls over the course of our lives. "I open up my innermost being, my head," says Deniz Alt. He deliberately makes himself vulnerable. "I'm not afraid of it because I'm at peace with myself." Most of his figures are real. It may have been a brief encounter that inspired Deniz Alt. The artist works with exaggerations, and he deliberately leaves some works unfinished. A picture, he says, is never finished.
His paintings and installations show the deep feelings and emotions of human existence in situations of unspeakable suffering, agony and death, to which he contrasts the driving force and lifeline of humanity: love.
