LEYLÂ GEDIZ

Leylâ Gediz approaches painting as a thought process and a discursive practice to explore the relationship between figuration and its conditions of possibility. Using a limited color palette, her process-oriented practice incorporates fragments from everyday life as filtered through contemporary image processing technologies. Her paintings are structural experiments that dislocate and rearticulate the background-figure relationship to simultaneously deconstruct painting into its constitutive materials and processes, and rearticulate it through techniques of assemblage. 

Gediz’ painting is about recomposing the world from the standpoint of what is usually held off the frame, with attention directed toward what constitutes the support structures of daily life and of painting as practice. Cardboard boxes, packaging units, stretchers, cables and joints made to be compatible with objects they support, connect and protect, take center stage in her compositions.  Attempting to define a perspective through the margins, taking as point of departure subordinate and nomadic positions of bodies, objects and tools, Gediz operates like a surrealist ethnographer of displacement and diasporic being, engaged in excavating emotions that everyday fragments emanate when they are carved out of their literal and metaphorical backgrounds. These fragments are played out by random, found, mundane yet useful objects, human beings close to her heart, the light and shadow they cast on each other, and their – sometimes awkward – volume in space. At first sight, Gediz’ compositions seem to carry a tribute to the grid as the primary form of spatial organization, repeated through the forms of the canvas, the stretcher, the screen and the network; but the meticulous painterly operations of shading that distance every other fragment from its background fully reinscribe them in the realm of mimesis. Through her subtle painterly composition, Leyla Gediz conveys an unstable, strange and hybrid reality,  hovering in that fragile zone between fiction and non-fiction. 

Leylâ Gediz (b. Istanbul, 1974) lives and works in Lisbon. She completed her MA in Visual Arts at Goldsmiths College (London, 1999) and a BA in Fine Art (Painting) at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL (London, 1998).  Her recent solo exhibitions include “Home Staging” at CAC Cosmos (Lisbon, 2024); “Cosa Mentale”, Galerie L’Atlas invites THE PILL (Paris, 2022); “Layer From Background” supported by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Edificio EPUL de Bartolomeu da Costa Cabral, Martim Moniz (Lisbon, 2022); “Denizens”, THE PILL (Istanbul, 2019); “ANAGRAM”, OJ Art Space (Istanbul, 2018). Her notable group exhibitions include “This Play” cur. by Emre Baykal, ARTER (Istanbul, 2022); “Hybridish” cur. by Alistair Hicks, Georg Kargl Fine Arts (Vienna, 2020); “Words Are Very Unnecessary”, cur by Selen Ansen, ARTER (Istanbul, 2019); “The New Normal”, The Hangar (Beirut, 2017); Freundschaftsspiel Istanbul, Freiburg Museum Für Neue Kunst (Freiburg, 2016); “Every Inclusion Is An Exclusion of Other Possibilities”, SALT Beyoglu (Istanbul, 2015); “Skeptical Thoughts on Love” cur by Misal Adnan Yildiz, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (Stuttgart, 2014); Istanbul Eindhoven-SALTVANAbbe: Post ‘89, SALT Beyoglu (Istanbul, 2012); “Dream and Reality - Modern and Contemporary Women Artists From Turkey”, Istanbul Museum of Modern Art (Istanbul, 2011). Leylâ Gediz’ work is included in prestigious public and private collections such as Istanbul Modern, Arter (Istanbul), ARCO Foundation (Spain) and Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven). In 2023 she was the recipient of the Sovereign Portuguese Art Prize by public votes.