An examination of the urban image in contemporary Turkish painting from the perspective of semiotics

In contemporary Turkish painting, the image of the city has been a multifaceted concept from the very beginning, in which artists prefer to think and produce works. From landscape paintings of military painters on the city to paintings that were influenced by the socio-cultural changes of the 1980s and carried critical discourse out of the unorthodox, the affected artists examined the city in various directions and carried it to their works. The development and change that began with urbanization in Turkey in the 1950s caused great differences, especially in all areas of life after the 1980s, and became the source that many artists fed in the process of creating their artistic productions. At the point where the problems grew and became inconclusive in cities that were also living spaces for artists, they didn't remained silent as witnesses to this situation and tried to reflect the dissonances and distortions that existed in their works. The semiotic method has been used to accurately reveal the meaning of these images, which are of great importance in representing reality. Semiotics, which have studied linguistic indicators as well as visual indicators, have proved that works of art can be analyzed using semiotics methods. In the semiotic method, which helps to reveal not only the visible but also the underlying meaning, consistent and objective analyses were made on the examples of contemporary Turkish painting and the Turkey of the period were looked at through urban paintings. The analysis of the works in the thesis work was taken under the leadership of Roland Barthes's book "Principles of Semiotics" and focused on denotation/connotation. Keywords: Semiotic, Visual Semiotic, Contemporary Turkish Art, Urban Art