Examination of Gürbüz Doğan Ekşioğlu's drawings in terms of minimalism

From history to the present day, people have used various methods to communicate. These communication efforts started with drawings made on cave walls and developed over time and reached to the present day. In the light of these developments, the art of illustration has emerged; people have aimed to convey messages to the receiver by expressing their feelings and thoughts with this method. Although the history of illustration is quite old throughout the world, this art branch in Turkey has shown a significant progress, especially with the proclamation of the Republic and the development of the printing press. In this process, Turkish graphic designers pioneered the development of illustration art and carried it to the present day. In the post-Republican period, it is possible to come across different examples of illustration in various communication tools such as magazines, newspapers and packaging. While in the past, people mostly used such printed tools for communication, today, thanks to social media, they can instantly convey their feelings, thoughts and messages kilometers away. The combination of the illustration method and social media channels has taken message transmission to a much different dimension. Messages with social, economic, cultural and political content are visualized by illustration artists by shaping them with imagination. Today, these illustrations have gained a simple, i.e. minimal form. The aim of this approach is to present the message in a clear and simple language. This visual expression language, born from the combination of minimalism art and illustration, is widely used in social media. Gürbüz Doğan Ekşioğlu, one of today's important artists, is one of the pioneers and carriers of this illustration trend on social media. In this study, Ekşioğlu's illustrations shared on social media are analyzed within the framework of minimalism. Twenty illustrations from 2024 were evaluated in the context of the artist's general artistic approach, analyzed and interpreted in line with design principles such as line, tone, texture, color, stain, proportion-proportion and style.