January
Leyla Gediz
"Coming Soon" includes the artist’s recent works -mostly designed as series- drawing from an experimentalist production process. Tackling psychological, social and developmental questions instigated by processes of attachment and remembering with a conceptual approach, the artist constructs the exhibition over the impossible representation of happy family life. These recent paintings, shaped between the pressure to consume as imposed by the celebration of culture and the future anxiety inherent in the social construct of family, bear traces of the personal transformation in which Gediz herself undergoes a generational rupture. Leyla Gediz, who for the first time is producing a painting series within such a conceptual coherence and focusing on variation technique, is constructing parallel stories with different pictorial values stemming from the nature of abstraction. The series “Coming Soon”, an abstract depiction of firework shows blasting through the sky over İstanbul during weddings and concerts, references the physicality of celebration and -as the feeling it leaves in memory- the ephemeral aspect of the spectacle. The “A Darkling Garden” series, in which she turns the time she spends with her family into a study, emerged during time spent in a garden where the light is constantly changing. These paintings feature the uncanny corners of the garden, trees and leaves that symbolize the unspoken, hidden, repressed secrets of shared lives with the balance of darkness and light.
Gediz, who also questions her own social map in the preparatory process of the Coming Soon exhibition, uses the white lies of everyday communication, other commitments presented as obstacles to meetings and future promises as typographic images in her drawings titled “We Almost Met”. Devising a performative working ground for another one of her series, the artist makes portraits of friends she sees only occasionally. Renowned for her contemporary approach to the tradition of the portrait from her earlier work such as “Atlantis 2000” (2001) or “Portre/Portrait” (2002), this time Gediz situates the reflexive relationship between herself and the young women she positions as models as the initial phase of an open ended research process. In accordance with the nature of working with a model, the project derives from the organic and reciprocal relationship between the artist’s subject and the content subject, shaping each other in the process.
Among the paintings outside the series, in line with the artist’s autobiographical approach, "No me mientas" (in Spanish; don’t lie to me) which has a dolphin bath toy at its center and “Paraphernalia” (in Latin, personal belongings of a person, especially a woman) which depicts a white flower figure composed of fish scales, are the most recent products of the artist’s obsessive relationship with objects.
Rampa hosts Leyla Gediz’s solo exhibition Coming Soon until January 7, 2012. It brings together Gediz’s new works that have not been exhibited before.
Images
01 Paraphernelia, 2011 Oil on canvas 120 x 120 cm
02 Not There 2011 Oil on canvas 80 x 110 cm
03 Portrait of Pınar Korun III (18.05.2011), 2011 Oil on canvas 100 x 70 cm