"If Baiza’s work operates through subtraction, through the charged economy of black ink on white paper, Ece Özel’s paintings move in the opposite direction, toward saturation and chromatic insistence. Where Baiza’s images pull you inward, Özel’s leap outward – they do not wait to be discovered, they announce themselves almost physically in space.
Özel, whose practice spans DJing, radio work and visual art, approaches painting as an extension of her sonic experience over the last decade – even though she originally studied fine art before music entered her life. Art was her first love. “I started drawing the first moment I could hold a pencil,” she told me two years ago in a conversation for Kaput – Magazin für Insolvenz & Pop, “I was four or five years old. There was nothing else I wanted to do.”
Studying art was therefore the next logical step, even if it did not unfold as she had imagined. Like many before her, she quickly realised that the academy did not necessarily strengthen her love of art; the conservative climate of the Turkish art scene at the time reinforced this experience. The result was a rupture: she stepped away from painting for nearly a decade."
Text: Thomas Venker
Ece Özel’s first solo exhibition, ‘Self-titled / Kendi Adıyla’, depicts a personal story of transformation.
The paintings, composed of intense atmospheric fragments where the normative boundaries of time and space dissolve, narrate a story by combining traces of a personal history with the sociological and cultural transformation that Istanbul experienced in the 2000s.
In Özel’s paintings, night appears not so much as a stage for spectacle, but rather as a temporary escape from the inertia of existence. It depicts a peace and transformative hidden power characteristic of nocturnal animals and people who live at night. Silhouettes blurred by movement, limbs melting into shadows, a couple sleeping under a dim light… Bodies appear, disappear, reshape themselves—as if swaying in a half-remembered dream at the end of a long night.
Özel’s avoidance of sharp figurative choices evokes moments that could only appear on the threshold between dream and reality. Like a film frame, the blink of an eye, the speed of a shutter, and a bass sequence we don’t hear but sense is there, these fragments form pieces of a personal archive. This approach is not merely a questioning of reality; it is also a call to confront the superficial aesthetics that glorify the allure of the age, the idea that everything is equally transient.
The bodies and colors, the movement and stillness, the escape and return merge into a whole—when the lights go out, life begins anew in everything that remains.
Text: Müge Büyüktalaş
Ambidextrous Group Show 5
16.01 – 08.02.2025
