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The artist Yasemin Cengiz Cagatay reflects on  the themes and motifs of this presentation and her own work:The works on view celebrate the rich dialogue between abstraction and figuration that takes place among the artists . Among them, Yasemin Cengiz Cagatay's works, at once bold and intensely detailed and conveying a rich vitality, are joyfully improvisatory, fluid and highly instinctual, abounding with imagery including eyes, faces in profile and other more indeterminate forms, often in pulsating combinations of color. Her works are chromatically and metaphorically rich, suggesting animals, plants, the human body and landscapes ranging from the microscopic to the macroscopic. Fluctuating between abstraction and figuration, the works on show transcend painterly traditions to fuse art with popular culture, and intellect with intuition. Painting for her is an act of searching, a very intuitive dance in the dark of brushes and colors. Her paintings exist in a dream world, a world that is made up of all the accumulated images stored in her subconscious:Poised between the strange and the familiar, her works are rooted in the  vibrant landscape of her mind and shaped by dreamlike associations that interconnect large-scale and smaller works. Almost transparent washes build gradients of color and form on these carefully constructed surfaces, on which the abstract remains visible amidst defined areas of representation. The meeting of the apparently mythic and surreal worlds on Cagatay’s picture plane finds an echo in the fairy painting of John Anster Fitzgerald and others of the Victorian era, as well as the mythical creatures of Hieronymus Bosch which fascinate her. Cagatay’s scenes of nature marry a futuristic interest in otherworldliness, a desire to imagine new vistas. This induces a synthesis of human, animal and vegetable life, imagination and reality, the empirical and the paranormal. She wants to create new dimensions in a blend of organic and cosmic lifeforms like the biomorphisms of the surrealist painter Roberto Matta.Her works refuse not only the limitations of logic, but also flout physical laws of scale, time and space.She often creates a carnivalesque world where the rational and the irrational, the abstract and the visceral, the beautiful and the grotesque are brought together in a vigorous state of play.

 

 

Yasemin Cengiz Cagatay grew up in Istanbul with an art teacher mother among paintings and art history books. She learned painting as a child, this leading her to national art prizes - including a first prize in a nation wide art competition when she was a high school senior. She has studied from 11 to 19 years old in Lycée de Galatasaray, a major establishment having formed the politicians and artists of the country. The French influence she received in this centuries old school with a blend of French and Turkish curricula reflects in her paintings. She has  studied at Bosphorus University Business School; which also taught a rich humanities program. The artist pursued a finance management career working as a management committee member for multinational companies, and quit to indulge in her passion for art. She gave herself a tailored art education, living in art centers - Paris, London and New York- and studied contemporary art at the programs of IESA Paris, Sotheby’s Institute of Art London and New York. Cagatay’s yearning to wed the eternal with the coming day, and her devotion to constant questioning pushed her to paint for a long time before exhibiting her work: her preoccupation with analogue and digital painting in relation to representational iconographies spans a decade. Starting with All Arts Istanbul fair in 2013, she had exhibited her work both solo or in group at Galeri MCRD and at art fairs, Contemporary Istanbul 2014- 2019- 2021 and Scope NewYork 2020.

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