Server Demirtaş

Server Demirtaş, born in Istanbul in 1957, entered the State Academy of Fine Arts Painting Department in 1977. After graduating in 1984, he collaborated with one of the leading figures of Turkish abstract art, Adnan Çoker.
Demirtaş always sought the possibilities of the third dimension in both his education and his later work, positioning himself as a sculptor. In his early period, his three-dimensional installations—created by covering newspapers with PVC and building them up in layers—were groundbreaking and attracted considerable attention for their time.
In 1987, he received the Achievement Award at the “New Trends Exhibition,” organized by Mimar Sinan University and regarded as the most innovative contemporary art show of the period. In 1989, he won the Jury Award of the Painting and Sculpture Museum at another important event, the “Contemporary Artists Istanbul Exhibition.”
Demirtaş’s ever-evolving, innovative artistic vision led him in 1997 to begin creating moving sculptures made from various machine parts.
Despite having no engineering education, his labor-intensive mechanical sculptures stand as significant examples of kinetic sculpture in Turkey. The use of ready-made materials—from car windshield wipers to bicycle brakes—combined through methods he devised and set in motion with gears, invites us to reconsider the relationship between science and art, technology and humanity, along a lineage stretching from the 12th-century robots of Al-Jazari, to Leonardo da Vinci’s machines of the 15th and 16th centuries, and Jean Tinguely’s kinetic sculptures of the 20th century.
In Demirtaş’s mechanical sculptures, certain human emotions—often elusive amid the speed of daily life and increasingly mechanized existence—are conveyed to viewers with striking realism, as if in slow motion. At the same time, they highlight the enduring dialogue between “the artist and creativity,” a theme reaching back to the Pygmalion myth of breathing life into sculpture.

Submitted by AWC Contemporary