Australian University posthumously honours TC artist

A LONDON-born Turkish Cypriot artist who lived and worked in Australia has been posthumously honoured at a retrospective exhibition of his life and work.

Melbourne’s Monash University launched the show, Mutlu Çerkez 19882065, on February 10 for the “influential artist who, during his lifetime, had a significant impact on the Australian and international art worlds”.

The artist used multiple media including painting, printmaking and sculptural installations, and the exhibition name refers to the conceptual artist’s habit of titling his work based upon a future date when he would remake it, not necessarily in its original form.

Mr Çerkez once said: “I imagined at the end of my life there being two series of works, the originals and the copies, in two different chronological orders. I thought the interesting thing would be the missing ones — the ones dated after I die.”

Mr Çerkez took his own life at home in December 2005, at the age of 41.

He had studied at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne before swiftly achieving recognition both in Australia and abroad, and represented Australia at the Saõ Paulo Bienal in Brazil and the sixth İstanbul Biennial in 1998 and 1999.

The new show runs until April 18 at the Monash University Museum of Art and displays works loaned from the artist’s family and from public and private collections across Australia.

An accompanying monograph includes newly commissioned essays and an illustrated “catalogue raisonnée” curated by Charlotte Day, Hannah Mathews and Helen Hughes.