Hotel Vagabond

31 Mayıs - 19 Haziran 2024

“The world is a hotel, and we are its vagabond guests for a single night.”

İbrahim Altun

A sentence that could easily serve as the logline of a film becomes the journey of a protagonist transformed into a painting exhibition. “Hotel Vagabond”—or the romance of wandering—is a meeting place for those who flee the crowd and those cast out by it. It is a realm of freedom so vibrant that it leaves no room for melancholy. The guests of Hotel Vagabond seem to have embraced life in all its contradictions, willingly accepting even the spectacle of becoming objects to be observed.

In his works, Altun seeks to normalize the unconventional lives of society’s misfits. At times, he reflects on the human conditions of contemporary life; at others, he revisits and reinterprets historical imagery. These paintings also function as acts of storytelling, revealing the artist’s literary background through their rich narrative quality.

Gülten Yalmanbaş

The exhibition, featuring the artist’s acrylic works in which collage is employed as a drawing-like element, will be on view at GALA Gallery from 31 May to 19 June 2024.