Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA is pleased to present an exhibition and monograph that survey the art and life of Mutlu Çerkez, the Turkish Cypriot Australian conceptual artist worked in a range of mediums including printmaking, painting and sculptural installations.

Exhibition Dates: 10 February - 14 April 2018 Opening: 10 February 2018, 3–5pm To be opened by Professor Callum Morton, Head, School of Art, Monash Art Design Architecture 

Çerkez was an influential artist who, during his lifetime, made a strong impact on the Australian and international art worlds. His work incorporated traditions of conceptual art, minimalism and monochrome painting but made its own internal logic its primary reference point while strenuously resisting a reduction to any single style.

Çerkez’s system of dating, where he added a future date to a work’s title to indicate when he would remake it, is one of the defining features of his strongly conceptual practice.He imagined that at the end of his life there would be “two series of works, the originals and the copies, in two different chronological orders”. Knowingly undermining the art historical convention of listing an artist’s dates (birth and death), Çerkez said that his most interesting works would be “the missing ones – the ones dated after I die”.

1. 26980 30 July 2038 1994, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 76 x 50 cm 

2. Untitled: 12 June 2017, (Kooyong: 12 June 2017) from the series New album cover designs for bootleg recordings of Led Zeppelin 1996, dot matrix and electrostatic print on paper, 55 x 48 cm (framed), State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth 

3. Untitled: 14 July 2030 from the series Stage furniture / props for an unwritten opera 1999, Marshall 1959 SLP amplifier, Marshall 1960 AX amplifier, Marshall 1960 BX amplifier, approx. 197 x 76 x 36 cm overall, installation view, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne, 1999 

4. Untitled 22109 (29 March 2025) from the series Notes for an unwritten opera 1992, gouache on graph paper, oil on canvas board, 30.7 x 40.8 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 

5. Untitled 22102 (22 March 2025) from the series Notes for an unwritten opera 1992, oil on canvas board, 19 x 45.7 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Monash University Museum of Art Ground Floor, Building F Monash University, Caulfield Campus 900 Dandenong Road Caulfield East VIC 3145 Australia