The Sufi Mother Who Teaches to Crush the Serpents Head

Rewriting Visual Memory In this series, Ekim Mağden revisits classical compositions embedded in the collective memory of Western painting history through a contemporary language of line and mark-making. Spanning from religious narratives to everyday and secular scenes, these images are redrawn, disrupted, and transformed — removed from their status as fixed and canonized representations in art history. The direct, rapid, and bodily character of acrylic paint markers and tag pens creates a deliberate contrast with the controlled compositional sensibility of classical painting. Subtle pictorial nuances give way to spontaneous lines, repetitions, layers, and intense movements of color. In this way, the images of the past are not merely copied; they are re-experienced by being filtered through the visual language of today. For Mağden, art history is not a closed past but a visual archive that can be continuously reactivated. The images of the old masters function here beyond being mere "references" — they become sites of encounter between contemporary consciousness and historical memory. In particular, within religious iconography, the boundaries between the sacred and the everyday, between faith and representation, between individual perception and collective memory, grow blurred. In this process of reproduction, the artist breaks the authority of the classical work without destroying it. On the contrary, a new visual layer is added on top of it. The original image and the artist's intervention continue to coexist on the same surface. For this reason, the works can be read as contemporary palimpsests built upon the past. At the core of the series lies the approach of transformation and recontextualization that recurs across different areas of Mağden's practice. Having previously brought together discarded objects, personal memory, and everyday materials in new contexts, the artist now applies the same method to art history itself. This time, the material being transformed is not a physical object but a cultural image. The result is a hybrid visual field that emerges between classical painting, contemporary graffiti, and personal gesture. Familiar images retain their recognizability while simultaneously becoming estranged. This estrangement invites the viewer to encounter the work not only through the question "which classical painting does this reference?" but also through the question "how does this image operate anew within my perception today?" In this sense, the series is less an act of reproducing art history than an attempt to establish a new point of contact between it and the visual consciousness of the present.

• Painting Type: Acrylic
• Year: 2025
• Style: Classical
• Subject Matter: Religious
• Surface: Paper
• Dimensions: Width: 35 × Height: 50
• Orientation: Vertical/Portrait
• Frame: Unframed
• Color Palette: Multicolor
• Technique: Brush Work
• Finish: Unvarnished
• Signature: Signed
• Condition: Excellent
• Authenticity: Original
• Edition: Edition Number: 43
• Certificate: Certificate of Authenticity, Artist Certificate