Sixty years of installations

From 16 September, Cologne's Museum Ludwig will honour the Turkish artist Füsun Onur with a retrospective. Born in Istanbul in 1938, the political artist is one of the most important contemporary artists in Turkey. Her contribution to the Turkish pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale has recently brought her back into the public eye. The museum in Cologne presents Onur's multifaceted oeuvre in a comprehensive exhibition, emphasising how she allows her work to grow beyond the horizon of »usual categorisations«.

Beginning with her early sculptures, in which she explores surface and space with precision, the retrospective moves on to her installations, in which, since the 1970s, she has supplemented her sculptures with everyday objects. The Museum Ludwig describes these as »fragile objects and spatial stagings« consisting of »panes of glass, pieces of wood, pieces of clothing, woollen threads, chairs, boxes, balls«. A narrative impulse continues to give her works a »poetic depth«. The retrospective features 94 installations, some of them room-filling, from the last sixty years, as well as a new spatial installation created especially for the event. The exhibition closes on 28 January 2024.