Contemporary art in urban Turkey:Religious motives and new trends in painting

No matter how enlightened with secular, scientific and technological developments, the contemporary world society has been striving to fill the spiritual gap created by the modern era. This gap, especially deepened in the last decade, has led societies to re-embrace their religious and national values all over the world. This tendency verifies the concept of Post-Secularism, proposed by Jürgen Habermas, as the inevitable consequence of secularism and the continuation of post-modernism. The aim of this study is to examine whether this tendency has also been experienced in today's Turkey through a thorough research in the contemporary art market. In this research, hundreds of oil paintings exhibited during the last decade of the Turkish art market are examined and the most appropriate samples are selected for visual discourse analysis. During the analysis, it is observed that there is an increasing tendency in prevalance to revive the Islamic symbols and traditional Turkish motifs within the contemporary oil paintings in Turkish art market. In order to understand how to read these religious and traditional discourses in the paintings, this thesis is based on the Art Theory of Pierre Bourdieu and the study of Re-invention of Tradition by Eric Hobsbawm.