About

Mahmut Öztekin was born in Batman in 2002. He graduated from the Painting Department of the Faculty of Fine Arts at Mardin Artuklu University in 2024. He lives and works in Istanbul.

His paintings deal with the body, belonging and identity. He has taken part in group exhibitions in Istanbul, Mardin and Diyarbakır, and in the Together at the Threshold programme at Nesin Art Village (2024) and the Your True Measure residency in Bursa (2026).

Artist statement

Mahmut Öztekin's painting practice treats the human body not as a fixed sign of identity but as a field where change and re-formation take place. Moving away from representing a particular person or a definite narrative, his figures come into being through states of dissolution, fragmentation and re-shaping.

For Öztekin the body is not merely a physical form; it is a surface on which memory, cultural codes and the sense of belonging accumulate. Coverings, fabrics and the figure's relationship with its surroundings continually shift the boundary between what is visible and what is hidden. The puşi in particular appears here not simply as an object that covers the body, but as a layer that carries identity, geography and memory.

The layers, erasures and additions on the painted surface bear the traces of this transformation. The image never becomes fully visible, creating a field of memory in which the past is not wholly erased but re-emerges with every new intervention. The painting thus becomes not a finished image but a structure that sustains a state of becoming.

In this process the boundaries between figure and ground grow increasingly uncertain. The space around the body, the movement of the fabric or a trace left on the surface begins to carry as much meaning as the figure itself. This tension between what is seen and what disappears creates constant movement within the painting, while allowing the body to look again both at itself and at where it stands.

The artist's practice questions where belonging begins and ends, to what extent identity belongs to the individual, and how the traces the body carries might be transformed. Rather than offering definitive answers, Öztekin's figures leave the viewer before an existence in continual change.