The Elgiz Museum announces its latest exhibition ‘A New Selection from the Elgiz Collection: Faces and Masks’ on display from 26 January-15 April 2016. ‘Faces and Masks’ is a literal and figurative exploration of social and personal identity with underlying themes of celebrity, gender, death and childhood. This selection offers viewers a chance to explore existing and newly-acquired works in painting, sculpture, video and photography in the museum’s Temporary Exhibition Space and Mezzanine floor. 

In this exhibition, we find representations of men, women, children and animals in spaces which may be either worldly and/or psychological. Public personas and private selves overlap. Works may be negotiated both singularly and collectively within a complex framework of identities. Upon entering the museum we are faced with Thomas Houseago’s bronze mask ‘Roman Masks II’, whose father was diagnosed with schizophrenia when the artist was six years old. To its right, David Lachapelle’s ‘Uma Thurman: Gossip’ strikes the viewer with the photographer’s signature hyperrealist elements, this time with Thurman’s crimson red lipstick and coloured eyes. 

Gülsün Karamustafa’s six-minute black and white video ‘Stairway’ opens on the entangled art nouveau Camondo Stairs in the old European quarter of Karaköy, which evokes nostalgia for a former Istanbul and memory of the 19th-century French Jewish Camondo family, and their unfortunate fate at Auschwitz. This together with the music of the Romani children combines historic and contemporary Istanbul. 

On the Mezzanine floor next to the museum offices, visitors can see the first acquisitions made by the Elgiz family in the 1980s. One comes across Modern Turkish painter Nuri İyem’s social realist portrait of the somber Anatolian woman, as well as German artist NERAM’s ‘Helmut, The Public Smoker’ showing the former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt notoriously smoking the cigarette that he could not dismiss. 

In this new selection, works by the following artists are on view: Alaeddin Aksoy, Ebru Alpagut, Tomur Atagök, Mahmut Aydın, Kezban Arca Batıbeki, Bedri Baykam, Ramazan Bayrakoğlu, Hüseyin Bilişik, Tuncay Deniz, Gürdal Duyar, Burhan Doğançay, Saim Gökhan Ercan, Eric Fischl, Gilbert and George, Mehmet Güleryüz, Haşim Nur Gürel, Hakan Gürsoytrak, Thomas Houseago, Nuri İyem, Çerkez Karadağ, Gülsün Karamustafa, Komet, Danielle Kwaaitaal, David LaChapelle, Levent Morgök, Fikret Mualla, NERAM, İbrahim Örs, İrfan Onürmen, İhsan Oturmak, Wolfgang Petrick, Neriman Polat, Alex Prager, Hande Şekerciler, Cindy Sherman, Hale Tenger, Yunus Tonkuş, Alp Tamer Ulukılıç, Xavier Veilhan, Halil Vurucuoğlu, Pınar Yolaçan and Şenol Yorozlu. 

‘Faces & Masks’ is on view from 26 January-15 April 2016