Peter Hristoff depicts the story of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden

These are the dominant themes of the recent works of famous artist Peter Hristoff shown in his latest exhibition, “Bahçede” (In the Garden), on view at the Contemporary Art Marketing (CAM) Gallery in the upscale İstanbul neighborhood of Nişantaşı.

 Born in İstanbul and living in New York, Hristoff, 51, has his own unique story to integrate into his art, which seems to combine all the elements of human experience through his travel between various cultures.

You have a very interesting family history...

My family is Bulgarian. Most of my family moved to İstanbul directly after the Balkan wars from villages around Thessaloniki and Macedonia, which were then predominantly Bulgarian villages. Actually, my father's family went from Macedonia to Sofia, and then from Sofia to Turkey. But my parents were born here, I was born here and we lived here until 1963, when I was 5 years old, then we moved to New York. My father is also a painter; he graduated from [what was called] İstanbul Güzel Sanatlar [Fine Arts Academy] at that time, now known as Mimar Sinan [Fine Arts University]. My grandfather studied in the academy in Sofia but came to İstanbul right after completing his studies. When my grandfather was a student, many of the Turkish painters of that time traveled to the Balkan countries as well as Eastern Europe just to study or to look at art. In Sofia he met Ali Sami Boyar and Hayri Çizel, part of the first generation of the so-called Western-Turkish artists, and so when he came to İstanbul, he immediately contacted them. He was also very much involved with the transformation of the Ayasofya into a museum with Boyar, who was the first director of the museum. My grandfather worked on the stamps and the first currency designs for the Turkish Republic.

So your artistic inclination comes from your family?

I think there's a kind of thread that runs in artistic families where some members of the family are more inclined to go towards art. My family never pushed me to be an artist. But it was always what I wanted to do, ever since I was a kid. I never imagined being anything else.

What about the influence of Turkish art in your works?

I think a lot of that comes from my immigrant experience. The fact that my parents left İstanbul, that they went to the United States, I think that created a kind of nostalgia for my motherland, for my birthplace. I grew up in atmosphere where Turkey, Turkish culture, İstanbul, was really in a sense romanticized. Maybe not consciously, but through the experience of being an immigrant, there's always a kind of longing for the motherland. Also, my parents were very much involved in the Turkish community in New York, my mother hosted the first Turkish radio program in the United States. So we never became disconnected from here.

Do you feel more like an American, a Bulgarian or a Turk?

Culturally, I think I most identify most America because I grew up there and I studied there and with Turkey because I was born here and I've spent so much time here. A strong part of my identity is also Bulgarian, but I've spent very little time in Bulgaria. I would like to think that I'm a combination of these three different cultures, of these three identities simultaneously. But as artists, our identity is really based on what we do, what we're trying to express rather than one nation or one particular culture. It's a little bit of a cliché, but I like the idea of being a citizen of the world.

Many of your works seem to reflect your experiences in Turkey...

A particular series, “Benim Türkiyem” [My Turkey], on which I worked for several years, does incorporate memories and mementos from my childhood, particularly memories that I associate with Turkey, with my early mementos of what our life was like in Turkey, as well as the gifts, the postcards, the books my grandmother would send me from İstanbul to New York. Some of those influences are in that work, but I'm also commenting on a kind of duality that we experience in the Turkish culture which we've been talking about for so long, the East and West, new-old, religious-secular, the combination which I think makes this city, this country, so fascinating and so exciting. We're full of paradoxes. And this sense of being in motion, of contradicting each other, is ideal material to talk about and to comment on.

In your works many different themes are used together...

If we talk about this formally, as an artist I'm also a teacher, I think it's very important in any work of art that there's a kind of coming together of contrasts and of the conflicts between different ideas, and this can be expressed, formally, with light and dark in painting, with the contrast of colors and also by using thematic contrasts. With my work, I always try to set up some type of a dialogue between these contrasts, between these opposing subjects. In this show, I tried to bring together ideas of spirituality with ideas of the physicality of the carnal. It's the classical human dilemma of “the mind versus the body” which to varying degrees is what we all struggle with. Our spiritual side and our physical side and how they come together and how sometimes they break apart. And this kind of tension is a part of human experience.

In the works man and woman are presented in their purest and most primitive form...

It's interesting because this body of work is basically inspired by the story of Adam and Eve. For some people this story is simply read as a story from mythology, for others it is taken in a much more profound and serious way. I chose to use Adam and Eve at the point where they are expelled from paradise. Most of the paintings in this exhibition are inspired by the fresco in Brancacci Chapel in Italy, which depicts the moment when Adam and Eve are expelled from paradise, from the Garden of Eden, and I really like the idea of that moment because it is the coming together and the result of the clash between physical desire and spiritual understanding. I think that's still a very potent issue to address in art.

And what are your sources of inspiration?

Basically, the umbrella of the human experience. What we're doing here, why we're here, how we live, how we act. That's the main skeletal structure of what I'm investigating. In that, the devices I'm using are figuration, the human form, but I also like using certain other devices, particularly decorative devices that exist in Ottoman and Islamic arts. I like to use patterns, stylized flowers and the arabesque motifs that we associate with the East or Eastern arts. I'm really trying to create a synthesis between my American art education, which comes out as a sort of pop art, and all of my interests in a labored and intensive kind of mark making that is generally associated with the East. I love Ottoman and Eastern miniatures, but I also love Jackson Pollock.

A rug becoming a holy place

Hristoff says he is impressed with seccades (prayer rugs) because they embody a physical object turning into a holy place. “This rug, a piece of fabric, becomes loaded with a different kind of meaning the moment that someone uses it. I like the relation between the object, the seccade, and the praying person. In a sense, it's similar to my appreciation of icons. So with this interest, I started creating rug designs. And my intention was always to come to Turkey for a period of time and to work on rugs with weavers. Several years ago I was asked to hold an exhibition at Ayasofya and I decided to take some of the designs I had been working on and have them woven. That's how I started. The rugs here are a result of an [artistic cooperation] with a group [of carpet weavers] from the village of Güllübahçe which is in the vicinity of Söke,” Hristoff explains. He has also made a call to help that weavers' workshop. “It's an exhibition which I organized and it will take place at the end of October. One hundred artists have donated artworks which we will sell for 100 Turkish lira apiece. Some of the artists are very famous, some of the artists are younger, newly emerging artists, but everything will be sold for the same price and all of the money will go to the weavers to keep them going.”

“Bahçede” runs until Nov. 5 at the CAM Gallery, located at Abdi İpekçi Cad., Altın Sokak, Ahmet Kara İşhanı, No: 2 in Nişantaşı. Tel.: (212) 248 8149