About

In Elif Saydam’s exhibition Everybody’s Fool at Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, viewers are thrown into a world in which Ottoman miniature painting is confronted with the Western figure of the fool at very close quarters. While the DIN-A4-format oil paintings open up a cosmos of Eastern ornaments and fragmentary bodies, the large-format works resort to harlequin costumes. The two work series operate on different technical levels: Photographs—or textile scans ironed onto canvases—become the first layer of Saydam’s works. The artist subsequently employs the method of traditional oil painting and …