Dirimart Dolapdere presents Ebru Uygun: Wet Light from January 5 to 29, 2023.
Ebru Uygun, who composes the theme of her painting by questioning the components of the painting itself, greets the audience with her latest works, in which she extends her practice’s attention beyond the surface of the canvas.
The infolding gestures of her early works where the canvas unravels to cover the canvas are replaced in her recent pieces with an outward movement that detaches the context from a conceptual plane and renders it visible. With a movement that trips up our expectation of a panoramic perspective, in Wet Light, Ebru Uygun reconstructs our impression of space and brings together works where the light is present not as a signifier but as an aspect of the painting.
The paintings on display go through processes such as accumulation, deposition, fragmentation, deformation, fracture, recuperation, and transformation within themselves and crack the door open for a transition from one state to another and perhaps for the possibilities of completely unexpected references. Materials like as cement, plaster, tile, and glue combine with pigments to form their own “clots” within the canvas material. Ebru Uygun manipulates the orientation of the ground by removing these collecting, petrified topographies from the horizontal plane. This movement in the earth convinces us that we are gazing at bits of a landscape, much how the mind finds a way to drift itself to familiar pictures. Uygun’s timeless surface landscapes are like reflections of bodily movements that hit the surface and freeze, that lie fallow and morph. Uygun’s paintings allow the observer to construct their own landscape with each glimpse, beginning with the artist’s initial touch to the canvas and progressing to their final shape with the guidance of the material.
