"Light and darkness, each serving as a catalyst for seemingly contradictory feelings. This happens most explicity in the realm of artifice...in Arat's constructed spaces, exacerbated by the intense light and shadows. One thinks of film and theater, as a sub-category of lived experience. One thinks of spaces as described in literature. In Arat's interiors, seascapes, and gardens there is little extraneous detail, removing them sharply from lived life. It would be overstating the case, but only slightly, to say every detail Arat chooses to include is there to cast a shadow, either literally or psychologically."

--Bill Arning, New York based critic

excerpted from essay, "To Cast Shadows," 1998, Galeri Nev

Serdar Arat is currently serving as the Diane Heath Beever '49 Professor of Art at Lasell College in Newton, MA. He graduated in 1977 from the Faculty of Administrative Science of the Bogazici University, Istanbul. He completed his higher education at the State University of New York in Albany. His first solo show was opened in New York in 1986, followed in the years to come by many other solo and group shows in various US cities.

Apart from engaging in painting, Serdar Arat also designed stage decors for theatrical performances by Virginia Woolf and George Buchner between 1990 and 1993. In 1992, he received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation award; the same year he won first prize in painting at the Asian-European Biennial. Since 1993, Arat has taught at the Fine Arts Faculty of New York Concordia College, while concurrently serving as director of the school's art gallery.

In addition to the collections of the University Museum at Albany, and the Robert College in Istanbul, his work is represented in the Pfeizer and Metromedia collections in New York, at the Central Bank Contemporary Art Collection in Turkey, among many other important public and private collections internationally.