“I investigate the beauty and the vulgar and the relationship between them.”

– Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin

Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin (°1957, Izmir – †2007, Istanbul) was fascinated by the difference between the promise of something and (banal) reality. This promise could be in the form of the name of a cheap hotel that suggests the experience of a distant place, or the image of a mass product that evokes luxury or exoticness rather unconvincingly. Alptekin was an artist who could see the profound effects global capitalism had on everyday life, and who observed the movement of people and goods across different geographies - particularly in the period since the collapse of the Soviet Union. He was a traveller, studied forms of brutal capitalism in places that are considered peripheral areas of western modernity. They are the carriers of meaning and remnants of all this - the signs of the burgeoning impact of mobility, marketing and image circulation - which Alptekin used as material for his art, as a means of contemplating their meaning.

The Democratic luxury exhibition was the first European retrospective of the work of Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin. Since the beginning of the 90s, Alptekin has focused on an all-embracing artistic production that includes photography, sculptures, installations, neon text, videos and collages. A "plastic arts project" that reflects the prosaic material qualities of the 'global mess' that brought about transnational free-market capitalism. Democratic luxury wants to bring us closer to the artist's thought processes and the works on display by means of a selection of studies, drawings and notes from the Alptekin archives.

Democratic luxury has been developed in tandem with RAMPA Gallery in Istanbul, where the two presentations together formed a large retrospective of the work of Alptekin. Democratic luxury was set up in collaboration with the Estate of Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin. The Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin archives are managed by SALT, Istanbul.