Şinasi Bozatli

1962 Ankara

Şinasi Bozatli was born in 1962 in Ankara. He studied painting and graphics at Gazi University in Ankara, completed his studies in Oswald Oberhuber’s master class at the Vienna University of Applied Arts. What forged his skills as a painter and sculptor were his astounding endurance, a feeling for rhythm, and self-discipline – indispensible preconditions and prerequisites for the artist.
Bozatli's current imagery results from these area-wide, high-contrast color tracks. Inspired by the New York skyline and its reflection in the Hudson River, his paintings are given a new shape. The colored beams turn into skyscrapers in diffuse light or flank a sunrise or sunset. Often the artist intentionally sets a "flatline" in the middle of the painting ground, whereupon he lets the geometric shapes grow mirror-like up and down. He strives for a lightness, indeed infinity, which he obtains both in the duality and in the outbound colors of his formations. Through titling, the artist also creates a bridge of perception to the images and brings us closer to the hidden. The viewer recognizes a ship at sea, the seabed, a harbor, pier piles in the water or water reflections as well as outlines of Venice, New York and Istanbul. They are dramatic scenes or meditative quiet poles. Again, Bozatli shows an interplay of feelings between narrowness and breadth, birth and death. In this way, the trigger of an impulsive emotion in its dramatic expressiveness is transformed into a painterly parable.
In 1986 Bozatli made Vienna the centre of his life and work; later he also spent periods of his life and work in his studio on Long Island (New York) and in Bodrum (Turkey). His works are exhibited in several foundations and private collections in Austria, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Turkey, South Africa, Japan and the USA as well as in the Landesmuseum Burgenland, the Landesmuseum Niederösterreich and in the Federal Chancellery of Austria.