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“Sand Flower,” an exhibition of works by Ahmet Güneştekin, will be on display at the AWC Gallery in Dubai from December 18th, 2021, to March 18th, 2022. Founded by Haldun Kilit, AWC is located in the Dubai International Financial Center (DIFC), which presents itself as an urban lifestyle collective. The gallery aims to bring Turkish and international artists together with art lovers in the Middle East-based Dubai and to open a new chapter in the art world. “Sand Flower” will be AWC Dubai’s debut show and run for three months.

The exhibition’s title, “Sand Flower,” comes from the desert rose, a complex formation of sand grains and crystal clusters. This fragile geological flower embodies an organic system, a self-organizing idea of the natural world, and is the structural principle for the artist’s thinking. This floral formation, its colour components, and its organic and fractal qualities, together with the patterns that generate a sense of infinity in the topography of the desert where it blooms, refer to the forms the artist embraced.

Güneştekin employs fractal patterns to investigate the manifestation of structure in nature. He raises the question: Are we in a state of infinite repetition? Is there infinite self-similarity? Infinite magnification of differences that are actually the sameness we thought was different? Iterations are used in the creation of his works, just as they are in the creation of fractal structures. And his work eventually becomes a part of the thoughts that blossom around it.

Many patterns in nature are so irregular and fragmented. The existence of these patterns challenges the artist to study those forms and investigate the morphology of the amorphous. Güneştekin conceives and produces his own version of the natural world, his own geometry of nature. These aspects of his practice emerge in the patterns he employs, where he merges the spiral structures with mythological components.

“Sand Flower” includes works that manifest the artist’s notion of this fragmented world. They unearth his vision that there is a fractal face to the geometry of nature. Among the exhibited are the bronze sculptures with vibrant patterns and structures that appear over his metamorphosed animals and whose traces may be found in the mythical cosmos; heart-shaped works in which he incorporates language into imagery with its lexical and reflective features; paintings that speak about the powerful mythic motifs in human life, the pattern of ending and renewal, as he does, inviting the viewer to witness the emergence of an exquisite butterfly; and his dimensional works focusing on the entire question of life and death, and the naturalness and potentiality of both concepts in human life.

In Güneştekin’s works, this spiral structure, which is the ancient symbol for the labyrinth, the twisted pathway for a journey to the core of being, these repetitive patterns and geometric movements reveal natural compositions such as the structural rings of a flower and the rippled sand waves. The rings, or intertwined solar flares, begin with a central origin on the surface, and the other rows expand from the centre to the outside. Along these, he uses a series of fragmented rings or collateral/abreast cells. Each cell’s field corresponds to a certain interpretation and colour, which often intertwine. The artist constructs this field of interpretation, covering it with a mythological shell as a formative element of the semantic structure. He describes the works as a dream that appears out of nowhere in a never-ending sand desert and then vanishes as it approaches. For him, the viewer’s reaction to the explosion of colours and patterns in his works overlaps with the image of this dream.