Artist: Volkan Diyaroglu

Text: Mariano Navarro
Dates: June 4th 2026, to July 17th 2026

Although born in Istanbul in 1982, Volkan Diyaroğlu has only lived in his hometown for twenty years. In 2002, he moved to Valencia, where he enrolled at the Faculty of Fine Arts of San Carlos and remained until 2004. In 2006, he was awarded a residency at the Abbaye de Maubuisson in Val-d’Oise, France, followed by another residency in Paris at the Cité Internationale des Arts between 2007 and 2008. In 2008, he received a grant in Romania at the George Enescu National Museum. In 2009, he undertook a residency in Porto, Portugal, which he repeated nine years later. Between 2022 and 2023, he was awarded a grant by the city of Gorzów Wielkopolski, Poland, and between 2025 and 2026 he divided his residency between Poland and Berlin. He has now returned to Valencia. He has also exhibited his work in almost all of the cities mentioned above.
Without this nomadic existence, it would be impossible to understand an artist who cannot be anchored to any predominant culture, but must instead be approached through a cosmopolitan background that is far from common, at least within the Spanish art scene.
Another essential aspect of his artistic personality lies in his youthful uncertainty between pursuing visual art or music. Although he ultimately chose the former, musical composition and performance have played—and continue to play—a leading role in his creative practice. He has his own band, Ulan, for which he composes the music, writes the lyrics, plays guitar and sings. This musical dimension also extends to the production of music videos, in which several of the mechanisms involved in the creation of his paintings can be recognised, particularly those belonging to the series Berlin Paintings, which is the focus of this exhibition.
Fragmentation of the screen, inverted images, the repetition of the same motif across different settings or figures, and the kaleidoscopic construction of the image are all strategies that run through much of his mature work. A decisive and germinal series for Diyaroğlu’s most recent work is Fighting With Ghosts—begun in 2023 and continuing through the present year—both because of the appearance and use of photography and because of the process of fragmentation to which the artist subjects the image. Although this process does not always dissolve its figurative representation, it does introduce new symbolic components.
The exhibition includes one work from this series, Implosion, 2023, whose working method is the same as that employed in the works comprising the Berlin Paintings. The artist describes it as the result of the following process:
“Over many years, a very simple question kept returning to my mind. What would happen if I painted a painting called Abstract in a hyperrealistic way? Would that painting be abstract or realistic? I came to the conclusion that a painting could not be abstract in any way. In fact, the moment a painting is made, it becomes part of reality and represents itself and nothing else. And we could also say that a painting can never truly be realistic. I then began painting paintings of my own paintings. I started cutting and tearing up drawings and collages I had made years before and painting them as if they were still lifes, trying to remain faithful to the result of that destruction. In truth, what I was doing was making hyperrealistic paintings of my own destroyed works.”
Implosion could very well be described as “a meta-painting of a destroyed painting.”
The majority of the works in the Berlin Paintings series invert the concept of décollage—the creation of an artwork by tearing, peeling away or removing fragments from an original image in order to reveal the layers beneath.
In this case, however, they are “constructed décollages,” adding layers rather than removing them, thereby creating a whole composed of fragments attached at their edges or superimposed upon one another, allowing the viewer to “read” the totality of the urban passer-by’s visual experience. Diyaroğlu uses photographs of walls from different streets in the German city, which he tears apart and subsequently reassembles, as one might complete a puzzle, giving them a new sense of coherence.

“The title of the exhibition, Dissociated Reality, is better understood through this explanation. They are fragments of reality from a specific place and moment, but at the same time, because they are painted by hand, they actually falsify that reality. In other words, they are not real; they are dissociations of reality—selected and reconstructed after an act of destruction. Ultimately, they are paradoxical works.”
A singular piece in the exhibition, apparently unrelated to the method described above, is There Is No Way In, 2026. Based on photographs of a Berlin street corner featuring a metal door covered in graffiti, Diyaroğlu fragments the image into an eight-panel polyptych that represents it with such verisimilitude that it even includes a “real” extinguished cigarette butt on the pavement in front of the door. In my view, this is not so much a contradiction of his own method as an exploration of a new path stemming from a germinal idea.
The entire series, in keeping with the rest of his work, is characterised by extraordinary vitality and chromatic richness, with an exciting predominance of reds, blacks, blues and greens and, in the case of Berlin VIII, a yellow that is as warm as it is strident and luminous.

(Adapted from fragments of Mariano Navarro’s text “VOLKAN DIYAROĞLU: A Paradoxical Artist,” august 2026, from the exhibition’s digital catalogue.)