With contemporary art there has been various changes as between artist, artwork and viewer. While new expression styles like ready mades, performance based works, video works were spreading, artists put away their aesthetic worries and they handled new questions. The begging period of contemporary art goes back to the first half of 20th century and based on lots of movements and activities which were all revolting against the verities. In this process the artists gave up to stick the common rules and shifted to personal expressions. Consequently it has been more diffucult to understand contemporary artworks than the artworks which based on a current theory. Contemporary artists usually consider social problems and they try to express their opinions in more different and suprising ways. In this term, artists usually prefer to use metaphorical explanation styles. The usage of metaphors, which have an important role in abstract thinking ability, present the artworks as metaphors to the viewers. It is possible to see that the artists have used metaphors as an artistic expression device during the art history as well. But when the metaphors used by contemporary artists were criticised it can bee seen that they are more anomalous and confusing. Because contemporary artists produce metaphors for different purposes. In this article selecting contemporary artworks in different mediums were criticised and it is tried to find out how the contemporary artists produce their metaphors and use them as an artistic expression device.
Keywords: Contemporary Art, Metaphor, Metaphorical Thought