​

Gallery co-founder Yasemin Cengiz Cagatay reflects on  the themes and motifs of  her own work, and the context in which they were made: A personal selection, made by the young artist Alp Cagatay, this presentation brings together futuristic, colorful works with a focus on surrealism. The artist's work gestures towards the incalculable process of art, which is  beginning with, ‘a very intuitive dance in the dark of brushes and colors', and is a poetic meditation on the life.The paintings invite us to journey across terrain in which  the utopian leads the way.

​

Most of the time  aiming for a sense of the sublime, YC Cagatay also seeks to create a reflection of her individual psyche. Valuing spontaneity and improvisation, in these series the artist employs  color emotionally and the paintings evoke the artists' enduring fascination with color as a reminder of the mystery of perception itself, exploring the aesthetic possibilities of color and space and their relations.Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, geometry and free form, the artist's compositions are intricate, dense, multi-colored, and literally full of layers — of colors, paints and meanings.  On the constant verge between figuration and abstraction, Cagatay’s multilayered works saturated with an array of references on a scale from Baroque to Delaunay's feature delicate and visually immersive compositions. Her swaths of vibrant color hug the picture plane with energy and her use of highly intense color corresponds to her own exuberant nature. Approaching painting as an experience in immersive subjectivity, she uses a digital brush, and stylizing gesture as a propulsive mark.Influenced by the Surrealists, her works featured organic forms with vibrant color accents. 

​​

The dynamics of her compositions included dramatic movements and dancing rhythms, excited, overflowing structures. In doing so, she continually reshapes, differentiates and reinterprets her individual visual language.  Jazz music found congenial artistic expression in her early paintings. Swept along from one note to the next by the frantic  pace and rhythm of free improvisation, accelerating into frenetic sequences of notes, modern jazz is similar to her working style in its pace and putting improvisation first. Influenced also by the Surrealists, her works feature organic forms with vibrant color accents. YC Cagatay is interested in powerful images that strike chords embedded deep in the reservoirs of our unconscious. Like most artists  she trusts her intuition. The unforeseeable is what turns out to be interesting: Her richly orchestrated paintings in fluid inks and acrylics are full of very intricate details and in this,  they reflect how much intense and protracted is the ‘work’ of painting for the artist. Changing her paintings innumerable times to come up with a satisfactory composition, the artist makes and destroys her canvases so many times due to her perfectionist character.Cagatay's works explode in  patterns that appear to grow organically across her compositions.

​

Although not a futurologist who systematically explores predictions and possibilities about the future and how they can emerge from the present, YC Cagatay has a predilection for anything futuristic, unseen; and paints futuristic vistas intuitively. For this exhibition her son Alp Cagatay chose 18 new vistas among them. From the Futurist movement Cagatay took the dynamic style which captured speed and movement as if in time-lapse, she juxtaposed colors of various densities and temperatures, repeating vertical, transparent brushstrokes. she lined rolls of paper in sublime fields of vibrant color.The paintings record Cagatay's ongoing reflections on color, density, and velocity, as well as her use of stencils applied directly to the surface throughout the painting process.In these canvases, Sui Generis forms migrate from one painting to another, appearing in new layers or fusing into clusters that advance and retreat.

​

​

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. She preferred to have her inaugural exhibition with the gallery she co-founded; and 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- 2020 and Scope NewYork 2020.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​