Taner Ceylan, “We Now Must Say Goodbye”

This Turkish artist specializes in what could be described as reverse Orientalism, subverting the 19th-century category of genre paintings that captured scenes of the Middle East imagined as exotic by Europeans at the time. Here, he employs its conventions—particularly the technically polished figurative approach associated with Beaux Arts painting—to tackle the grandaddy of the Orientalists, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. In one notable image, Ceylan reframes the neoclassical master as an art-historical cross-dresser, transposing the image of his head from his self-portrait as a young artist onto the satin-swathed body of the Princess de Broglie, the subject of Ingres’s 1851–53 portrait of the same name.