MELIS BUYRUK｜HABITAT: BLOOM

Leila Heller Gallery is pleased to present Melis Buyruk’s debut in New York, with the solo show “Habitat: Bloom” on view from July 21st to September 2nd, 2022.

The exhibition showcases seventeen porcelain works by Buyruk, where a ceramic topography of intricate flora and fauna are encased in wooden boxes, and granted their own habitat. In a mastery of porcelain, the traditionally feminized and overlooked art form associated with domestic life is reinterpreted as a medium that points to bio-futurist tensions.

Marking Buyruk’s first exhibition in New York, “Habitat: Bloom” presents the first viewing of the Turkish artist’s large-scale works, which comes as a response to Leila Heller Gallery’s New York exhibition space. Allowing for the deeper immersion into Buyruk’s intricate and delicate porcelain world, the larger works create for a more commanding visual confrontation with Buyruk’s hybrid flower forms.

Buyruk identifies and subtly blends patterns of vegetation and the natural world, creating porcelain flower fields. They are disorienting, as they evoke both artificiality and illusion in a play on logic. While strikingly realistic and incredibly meticulous, the porcelain flowers are unfeasibly monochrome, hybrid, and eerily level, suggesting an alien environment. Lit up, and enclosed in a box, the work is further imbued with notions of the fantastical. Fluctuating between boundaries of reality and surreality, the show reminds the viewer of our fractured and disjointed relationship with nature, and provokes a double consciousness.

Drawn to the poetic fragility of porcelain, and the physical engagement it required, Buyruk became a specialist in the craft at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Selcuk University. Buyruk’s reintroduction of the material in contemporary context, recognizing and manipulating its ability to uncannily mimic organic forms, saw the artist be exhibited across Turkey.

Courtesy of Leila Heller Gallery

Feature: Melis Buyruk, Blooming Tales, 2022, Porcelain, 22k Gold Decorated, Lightbox, 120 x 120 x 12 cm