Prof. Gülay Yaşayanlar continues her work as an artist, art educator, curator and art writer in Izmir and London. Over the years, Yaşayanlar has participated in numerous national and international exhibitions, as well as organising six solo exhibitions. She worked as a faculty member at Dokuz Eylül University Fine Arts Faculty between 1999-2020 and served as the Head of the Painting Department. She is the founder of the art production and publication centre called SAGLAMARTSPACE, and the online art magazine platform SAGLAMART.COM.

From the very beginning, she has based her understanding of production on psycho-dynamic grounds. Yaşayanlar intensely includes imaginary and fictional elements in the plastic universe she has constructed; dealing with the representation of an abnormal world through the visual order she has developed. Her line of work can be defined as processes that express themselves by developing abstract and conceptual forms. She presented a phase of this transformation in the exhibition titled Encore, which she organized in Ankara Atlas Art Gallery in 2010. In addition, in her solo exhibition titled Once Again, Once More at Istanbul Merkur Art Gallery in 2011, she has presented examples of the change in the language of form and the possibilities of mixed techniques. Soon after this orientation, she took an approach that focused on more symbolic and intellectual icons in image structuring and presented her works in the book named Imagination and Distance.

Recently, she has been producing works that can be clarified in a questioning manner based on psychic reasons and evaluated in a contradictory aesthetic context. Her performative state of mind, which can also be seen in the scope in his latest works, makes you feel all the spiritual tensions of the epidemic process and consist of damaged surfaces. In these recent lines of work, which she's chronologically called Heart, Chest Pulse, Glamour I-II, Surfacing Images, Divergence Effect and Post Trauma Paintings; a holistic will is expressed. For her, visual elements that turn into symbols becomes a new "thought form" with increasingly stratified distinctions. We are witnessing an important transition in the art of living with these paintings, which form a dynamic formatting language and model.

Categories / 2020 - 2022