Neşe Baydar is an artist who has understood the power of emptiness, the value of dissolution, and the constructive dimension of erosion. Her current exhibition at Millî Reasürans proves that due to her radical approach to painting, she has found a way of overcoming the dichotomy of showing and hiding, as well as creating and erasing. The works shift between figuration and abstraction, as well as expressionism and conceptualism, and beautifully combine the fields of drawing and painting.

Baydar’s works mean powerful alternatives to the given state of our visual culture as well as the trends of contemporary painting, in which a mass of photo-based works currently dominate the scene. In contrast to most of the superficial figurative or realistic paintings, which tell the spectator what to see, and what to think, her pieces open up multiple possibilities of meaning. Instead of being an illustrating craft, her work critically reviews the idea of painting and its relation to reality in order to question the being of art as well as its function as instrument for reflecting reality. In this sense, her current series means a valuable contribution to the discussion around the meaning of painting and its relation to the construction of reality.

Marcus Graf