Ercan Akın

Ercan Akın (b. 1979, İzmir, Turkey) is an artist based in Japan who works in painting, drawing, installation and photography. His subjects are loneliness and imagined spaces. They mark the distance between a fear of being alone and the lives people picture for themselves. In his account, people who avoid their fears struggle to form an identity and screen themselves off from reality. Works shown by his gallery are in oil on wood panel and ink on paper.

Several untitled oil paintings on wood panel date from 2015, from 45.5 by 60.6 cm to 116.5 by 116.5 cm. Untitled ink drawings on paper followed in 2020. Umutsuz Bekleyiş (Hopeless Wait, 2022) drew on his travels between Japan and Turkey from 2015 to 2022. It included portraits set in empty surroundings and images of a dead swallow, a dead rabbit and a storm-bent tree. Its themes were isolation, not belonging and a kind of chosen exile. An untitled panel of 2022, 235 by 160 cm, assembles 37,415 hand-cut wooden cubes painted in acrylic.

Akın entered the State Turkish Music Conservatory of Ege University in 1998 and left in 2002. He then studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Dokuz Eylül University (2004 to 2008). His gallery states that he has held three solo exhibitions. The one documented is Umutsuz Bekleyiş at Bozlu Art Project, Istanbul (2022). He showed in Sanat ile Eğitime Destek at Salt Galata, Istanbul (2023). Group shows at Bozlu Art Project include Düşten Güzel, Hayalden Öte: Bozlu Art Project'in 10 Yılı (2023 to 2024) and Aykırı İşler (2024). In 2026 he shared Wabi-sabi there with Ayşegül Veryeri. The gallery took his work to Contemporary Istanbul (2021, 2022 and 2024) and CI Bloom (2023 and 2024). He is on the artist list of Bozlu Art Project, Istanbul.