Earth Shadow
Earth Shadow
6 September - 06 October, 2019
Opening: 6th September Friday, 6.00 pm
Rem Art Space is pleased to present Earth Shadow, the gallery's first exhibition with Brooklyn-based artist Ayça Köseogulları, whose new graphite drawings explore potentials of lines and document her relationship with paper in terms of physicality, movement, and subconsciousness. Using tumultuous or placid hand gestures, the artist balances pace with motion, abstraction with volume, and density with contemplation. Köseoğulları’s mark-making challenges the concert between mental and physical states, utilizing lines to chronicle beyond the evident. The artist’s abstract drawings of lush layers and serpentine contours stem from her inhibition to exercise the limits of artistic command over paper and testing visual and narrative tropes of abstraction.
- various scales and compositions, the works attempt to encapsulate moments fleeting in the flow of time, hiding in secluded corners of memory. The dusty effect Köseoğulları achieves from graphite coats paper with an ethereal layer, manifesting a dream state between remembrance and fading. Intricate details of her lines prompt viewers’ attention for intimacy and close observation across the surface. Meandering and transient, memory grants the artist with creative stimulus, translated onto paper through a flood of driven hand movements. Thick layers of graphite occasionally resemble gallops of paint amassed on canvas, conveying painterly compositions through a laborious process. Thin traces of graphite require persistent and resilient repetitions from the artist, who has over the last two years transitioned into a heavily abstract visual lexicon and furthered her experiments with form and technique. A growing interest to the subliminal has been formative for Köseoğulları during this transformation, with commitment to a vaster pool of influences unrestrained from symbols of the mundane. Her freer approach to form and narrative is manifested in drawings’ fluid yet determined bodies.
Köseoğulları’s relationship with her studio—as a ground both for creation and refuge—is a key element in her process of finding salvation from urban haste and freed from time and place. Her occasional faint references of architecture or figures are dotted across dense lines resembling vigorous arrows at full speed or dim horizons at a remote land. Anchoring the exhibition is, In Search Of, a larger-than-life vertical drawing of mountainous heaps with washes of grays in ample hues, nearing pitch black or pure white to constitute a topographical landscape. Köseoğulları adds the work a sculptural quality by working directly onto rolled paper, letting the paper extend onto the floor.
Text by: Osman Can Yerebakan
About artist: Ayça Köseoğulları
Born 1977, Istanbul, Turkey
Studied at The Mimar Sinan University's Academy of Fine Arts Istanbul, Turkey
Lives and works in Brooklyn