Creatine is a Form or Rebellion

Artist: Ilyas Kirkan

Exhibits open during Art Walk on the 1st Friday of every month. 6pm-10pm

Gallery hours Monday through Friday 10:00am – 5:00pm

Extended Gallery Hours most Fridays until 10pm

Occasionally galleries may be closed for private events

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Overview

“Take time with each painting and see where it takes you. It’s not about liking what you see, but the journey it takes you on. A journey through time and space …” 

Art often begins where familiar structures end – challenging boundaries without permission. For me, creating is a way to disrupt and move beyond linguistic, cultural, and traditional patterns, pushing ideas beyond limits and imagined borders on both an individual and collective level. 

I create to loosen fixed meanings, personal limits, and inherited boundaries. By crossing lines, I challenge what is taken for granted, what is assumed, and invite new dialogue, understanding, and transformation. My work unravels what feels permanent, making room for fresh meaning to emerge. For me, creating is a form of rebellion – refusing to accept the world as it is. 

My work is shaped by layers of memory and history, where patterns fade, fracture, and reappear over time. Each surface carries traces of what came before – old meanings, old stories, old wounds – only to be overwritten, rewritten or transformed by what follows. These layers are never neat; they overlap, shift, and remain in motion. 

This is reflected in my material process … 

Through layers upon layers of textured collages, white gauze headscarves, knitted lace decorations and cloths, lace net curtains, sand, gravel, leaves, glue, and paint I build surfaces that become physical records of memory. White is the symbol of peace. White are the headscarves of the Kurdish Saturday Mothers, also known as the Peace Mothers – beaded with colours like blossoming flowers, each colour a hope, each hope a refusal to disappear. The textures accumulate like histories – dense, uneven, and sometimes unstable – revealing the tension between preservation and erosion. The materials carry the weight of time while resisting permanence, suggesting that memory is always changing, never fixed. 

Creation is not just expression; it is movement – movement of ideas, identities, and perception. It crosses borders that politics, language, and habit reinforce, resisting systems that seek to contain identity and thought.

That is why going beyond one’s limits is essential. By pushing past comfort and inheritance, the work becomes a site of discovery. Art speaks across differences not by offering answers, but by inviting others into shared questioning. 

Ultimately, it is about creating new traditions by daring to break old ones. 

BIOGRAPHY 

Entirely self-taught Danish-Kurdish Artist Kirkan, İlos İlyas Elias was born in central Anatolia in 1972, brought up in Denmark. After living in London for over 18 years, where he started his arts career, he decided to move to Lisbon. 

Kirkan has had numerous exhibitions of his abstract layered textured collage based paintings in diverse cities such as London, Brighton, Godalming, Copenhagen, Elsinore, Antwerp, Beirut, Paris, Cologne, Montreal, Tokyo, Caprinoe Veronese, Marco Island, Fort Myers, Fort Lauderdale, Palm Springs, Provincetown, Lisbon in Portugal and Lisbon in Ohio. Adding Harf Al-Batin as the 20th and Saint Petersburg in Florida to the list as the 21st city. 

Kirkan has twice been a part of the JAALA Art Tokyo BIENNALE at the Tokyo Metropolitan Arts Museum as well as the International Montreal Arts Festival. 

Kirkan has been granted arts funding to create “The Heavenly Window” a conceptual outdoor sculpture – public, architectural, and interactive in nature – designed to engage the municipality’s citizens by sparking curiosity and interest in art, deepening and promoting self-awareness, fostering connection and integration, and bringing people into shared public space. 

MY SIGNATURE 

I choose to sign my work on the reverse of the paintings to enable the owner the freedom of how they wish to present it. The lack of an ‘anchor’ in an artist’s signature ensures that my view is not imposed on which way the work should be hung. I believe that this too reflects the versatility of the mind, which can be shaped and adapted to meet the needs and conditions of its local environment and this will contribute to the greater debate of what art represents to the broader public.