Welcome back to AL-MONITOR Istanbul.

Most of my colleagues this week have their eyes fixed on Ankara, bracing for the NATO summit that will, by all accounts, paralyze the capital with motorcades, security cordons and an unseemly number of detentions. I propose the hedonistic path: a sweeping tour of the great things happening in Turkey’s three largest cities: a once-in-a-generation exhibition at Arter, a new gallery in Ankara’s Kavaklidere and a Michelin-recognized restaurant that has been making Izmir proud. Consider this your permission slip to dwell in earthly delights.

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Nazlan (@NazlanEr on X)

P.S. Have tips on Istanbul’s culture scene? Send them my way at nertan@al-monitor.com.

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1. Leading the week: The alchemist’s atlas

From the series Untitled (Photo Firat Ruzgar)

Arter’s latest exhibition, “Atlas 1/137,035999,” leaves you wondering whether artist Tayfun Erdogmus’s studio looks less like a painter’s workshop than a natural history storeroom.

The exhibition itself is an array of leaves and flowers collected in nature, dried and catalogued in large notebooks, and sorted by shape and type. From this archive, Erdogmus builds his paintings: layering plant matter and minerals onto canvas, binding them with chemical and acrylic solutions, and coaxing the veins and stems of leaves into forms that read almost like calligraphy. The results sit somewhere between specimen and surface, between botanical illustration and abstraction.

Now 67, and with a practice spanning four decades, Erdogmus is finally getting his first institutional solo show in Turkey. “Atlas 1/137,035999” takes its title from the fine-structure constant, one of physics’ most stubbornly unexplained numbers: the dimensionless figure governing how light and matter interact, still awaiting a derivation that makes intuitive sense. Erdogmus uses it as a coordinate for a practice that moves between cosmology and craft, between the cellular and the cosmic.

“Radiant Fragments” (detail)  made with........

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