Gökhun Baltacı

Kaufmann Repetto is pleased to present A Moonless Plateau, Gökhun Baltacı’s first solo exhibition in the United States, at the gallery’s New York space.

Working exclusively with oil pastel on paper, Baltacı returns to the enclosed rooms and isolated objects that have long occupied his practice, stripping them of almost everything that might explain them. Walls, windows, loose threads, screens, and fragments of furniture remain; human presence appears only intermittently, in the form of a seated self-portrait or an indistinct face reflected against a dusty surface.

A plateau is a level, elevated expanse whose scale is difficult to grasp - without moonlight, it offers no clear measure of distance or direction. The exhibition title evokes a landscape that is never directly depicted. Instead, Baltacı displaces its spatial uncertainty into a succession of interiors without a visible source of light, treating the room itself as a kind of landscape. Floors and walls appear to dissolve into the same muted atmosphere; perspective is established, then gradually loses its hold. A loose thread of fabric extends across the floor and reappears, visually tying one work to the next. A dark circle may resemble an opening or an eye, or the surreal presence of an almost monolithic object.

A deep gray seems to lie beneath Baltacı’s blues, violets, and greens, binding each image to the same atmosphere. Oil pastel gives the surfaces their dense, velvety quality, while repeated rubbing, layering, and reworking leave the paper worn, as though it had been handled over time. Figures and objects rarely detach completely from their surroundings: a body takes on the color of the room that contains it, while translucent partitions and reflective surfaces make it difficult to determine what is near or distant, solid or reflected. Against this subdued palette, small flashes of cobalt blue or fire red remain restrained in scale yet startlingly luminous.

The artist has long been interested in the ability of childhood imagination to release objects from their ordinary functions and place them in unfamiliar relation to one another. In A Moonless Plateau, this associative impulse operates quietly. A glass of water or milk, an anonymous audio cassette, an unbranded pack of cigarettes, and a translucent folding screen remain recognizable, yet none explains its presence. The loose thread running through the exhibition seems to gather these disparate images along a single line, giving them the persistence of memories connected by an event that remains inaccessible. They suggest relations without resolving into a code or a single interpretation.

Nothing overtly occurs, yet the stillness of these works does not feel neutral. Each image seems to retain the pressure of an action that has already passed, or of a presence that has just withdrawn. The uncanny is not introduced as a rupture of ordinary life, but located within its most familiar surfaces: the moment when a room, an object, or a face remains entirely recognizable and nevertheless becomes strange.

Gökhun Baltacı was born in 1989 in Ankara, Turkey. Since 2017, he took part in several institutional group shows, including The Sky Was Candy, Arter, Istanbul (2026); Shaken Image, Pera Museum, Istanbul (2018); and The Same Garden, Evliyagil Museum, Ankara (2018) among others. kaufmann repetto presented Gökhun Baltacı for the first time in Milan in January 2025. He also works with Galeri Nev in Ankara and Istanbul, and was exhibited several times in Turkey (2022, 2019, 2017), in addition to a solo presentation at Paris Internationale (2022). Gökhun Baltacı was selected for the prestigious Cité Internationale des Arts residency program in Paris during 2024.