Fakes and Forgeries with Serdar Arat

Serdar Arat, artist and sculptor, takes us into the world of art fakes and forgeries. Art fakes and forgeries give us the combined satisfaction of a captivating criminal mystery, and the profound contemplation of what we expect from art in the first place. As fakes and forgeries get more outrageous and damaging, some forgers enjoy celebrity status, and their fakes are studied in museum exhibitions. Most alarmingly, museums around the world are also full of undetected fakes that are proudly exhibited as genuine art. An exploration of how forgers convince, how they are detected, and why authenticity matters.

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Serdar’s art exhibit ‘Works on Paper’ will be on display in the Library’s Schaffner Gallery September 16 through November 11.

Serdar Arat http://serdararat.com served as a Prof. of Art at Concordia College-New York from 1993 to 2017, as the Director of the OSilas Gallery from 1994-2008, and as the Diane Heath Beever ’49 Professor of Art, at Lasell College, in 2010-2011. He is also a visual artist, exhibiting internationally since the 1980’s, primarily in New York Cityand Istanbul. Received his MA and MFA in Painting from the University at Albany. His many public lectures include, Fakes Forgeries and Discoveries in Art, Art and Ideology, Art of the Islamic Worlds, Price and Value in the Art World, a TEDx talk on art and memory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvUKxHSjTHE , among many others. His artworks are characterized by shaped paintings on canvas and wood, with dimensional surfaces, and metaphorical images of vents, sirens, and shadows, as well as sculptural landscapes in cast bronze and mixed media. A short documentary film. These Paintings Cast Shadows, by Kenneth Calhoon, exploring the process of Arat’s work was completed in 2013: http://vimeo.com/60057267. Arat’s more than thirty individual exhibitions include Kouros Gallery-NY City, Monique
Goldstrom Gallery-NY City, Hal Katzen Gallery-NY City, White Columns-NY City, University Museum at Albany-NY, Galeri Nev-Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey; and more than forty group exhibitions include Howard Scott Gallery-NY City, Art in General-NY City, Gallery 1756-Chicago, Bronx Museum of Art-Bronx, NY, and others. His awards and grants as an artist include Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and 4th Asian-European Biennial Painting Award, Ankara Turkey. His paintings are included in more than a dozen public and corporate collections. Various writings and reviews about his work as an artist include more than 20 newspaper articles in the USA and Turkey, including Dominick Lombardi, The New York Times, NY, September 26, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/26/nyregion/art-futuristic-works-that-define-dimensions-of-time-and-space.html ; William Zimmer, The New York Times, NY, June 3, 2001; William Zimmer, The New York Times, NY, February 18, 2001; William Zimmer, The New York Times, NY, April 10, 1988; the book by Bill Arning, Serdar Arat 1983-1998, Galeri Nev Publications, 1998; and many others.
For more on Serdar Arat‘s work: http://serdararat.com