Skin

5 Jun-25 Jul 2026

PV 7 Jun 2026, 12-5pm

Mehmet Ali Uysal, Skin

Overview

Following thirteen years at 55 Eastcastle Street in Fitzrovia, the move marks a significant new phase for the gallery, expanding into a larger two-floor industrial building at Perseverance Works in East London. Defined by pitched ceilings, exposed steel trusses, and industrial windows, the new space reflects Pi Artworks’ focus on ambitious installation-based practices, interdisciplinary production, and expanded public programming.

Occupying the first floor of the building, Skin presents a new selection of works from Uysal’s internationally recognised series investigating architecture, perception, and the physical limits of built space.

Working across sculpture and site-responsive installation, Uysal approaches walls, floors, and urban structures as if they were living surfaces — stretched, compressed, pierced, displaced, or held under tension. Through minimal yet precise interventions, familiar architectural elements appear unstable, elastic, or physically responsive, subtly disrupting the viewer’s relationship to space.

Originally trained in architecture and urban planning before completing a PhD in sculpture, Uysal’s practice operates between structural logic and perceptual illusion. His works frequently emerge directly from the material and psychological conditions of their sites, transforming architecture into something bodily, vulnerable, and strangely animate.

“The wall is not only something that divides space,” Uysal has noted, “it is also a surface carrying memory, pressure, and traces of human presence.”

Large-scale iterations of the Skin series have been presented internationally through institutional exhibitions and public commissions across Europe, the United States, Mexico, Taiwan, Vietnam, and the UAE.

About Mehmet Ali Uysal (b. 1976, Mersin) lives and works in Paris. He is an internationally recognised sculptor known for site-responsive installations that intervene directly into architectural and environmental structures. Often treating built environments as if they were living, malleable bodies, Uysal examines how space is perceived, experienced, and physically felt. 

He is best known for his Skin series, in which walls, buildings, and ground surfaces appear stretched, compressed, pinched, or displaced through minimal yet precise interventions. Large-scale iterations of Skin have been realised internationally, including a major commission for Umeå European Capital of Culture 2014 and recent large-scale installations in Paris, alongside public projects across Europe, the United States, Mexico, Taiwan, Vietnam, and the UAE.

Across his broader practice, Uysal continues to approach architecture as both boundary and material. In works such as Peel and Suspended, walls, frames, and exhibition structures appear folded, lifted, or destabilised, subtly disrupting the conventions and assumed neutrality of gallery space.

Originally trained in architecture and urban planning at Middle East Technical University, Uysal later completed a PhD in sculpture at Hacettepe University. This trajectory — from planning to intervention — remains central to his practice, where architecture is approached not as a fixed system, but as a mutable structure open to transformation.

Artists