119 artists, 230 works: Istanbul Modern presents Under the Same Blue

When is a museum collection complete? Perhaps never. The works may remain in place, but the way viewers see them changes, and the same piece can tell a different story when placed beside another.

Istanbul Modern’s new collection exhibition, “Under the Same Blue,” takes that idea as its starting point. The museum’s 10th collection show brings together 230 works by 119 artists, extending from the Nejat F. Eczacıbaşı Collection Exhibition Hall across the museum’s floors, foyers and library. Forty-three of the works are being shown for the first time.

The exhibition revisits the transformation of modern and contemporary art in Turkey from the 1940s to the present. Its opening section follows that development through a historical sequence, from early examples of abstraction and figurative art to social realism and conceptual approaches. It highlights the relationship between artists’ changing aesthetic searches and Turkey’s social and cultural transformation.

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Under the Same Blue brings together sections that combine historical continuity and thematic readings within the same structure, without entirely abandoning a chronological account of art history. The blue in the exhibition title offers a conceptual ground for establishing new relationships between different periods and geographies.

The “blue” in the title is not simply a color. Curators Çelenk Bafra and Deniz Pehlivaner present it as a space for thought, evoking the sea and sky, distance and closeness, freedom and the horizon. It brings works together without dissolving their differences. Rather than searching for works that are literally blue, visitors are invited to consider the questions that bring apparently distant works closer.

Bafra said the exhibition combines historical continuity with thematic readings without abandoning a chronological account of art history. Pehlivaner said it invites viewers to reconsider artistic production from the 1940s onward through issues that remain current, including relationships across art history, connections among artists and the visibility of women artists. The curatorial text also invokes Walter Benjamin’s understanding of history, presenting the collection as something that can be reread through the questions of the present.

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Under the Same Blue invites us to rethink artistic production from the 1940s to the present through issues that remain current today.