L’Atlas launches the second part of its programme of galleries from the international contemporary scene by inviting THE PILL® (Istanbul). On this occasion, the Turkish gallery presents for the first time in France a solo exhibition by the artist Leylâ Gediz, which brings together recent works spanning from paintings to video and site-specific interventions and explores the artist’s ongoing research on contemporary painting, embracing notions such as displacement by addressing them through the lens of her personal life broadened to collective narratives. Intrigued by the shifts of diasporic beings across the world, Leylâ Gediz is devoted to expanding the field of painting, its settings, and its audiences.
On this occasion, Gediz will display a group of new works that reflect on the possibilities of being unrooted stemming from her personal experience of coming from Istanbul and living in Lisbon. Leylâ Gediz is an archaeologist of every day fragments excavating the emotions they emanate. These fragments are played out by random, found, mundane yet useful objects, humans close to her heart, light and shadow humans and objects cast on each other, their – sometimes awkward – volume in space, memories and stories they trigger. They come from different backgrounds, from different moments in time to be masterfully carved out of their literal and metaphorical backgrounds. How they build each other anew in relation within the particular space of still life painting is humble, precise and magical at the same time. They are too real to be unreal, hovering in that fragile zone between fiction and non-fiction. «Affected perspective» may be a useful term for the humble magic Leylâ Gediz enacts in her new series of paintings realised in her studio in Lisbon; where she relocated together with her family a few years ago. In this exhibition, the artist continues to explore her desire to create a new space for open constellations in her work, to take a serene and critical distance towards what she has produced in Istanbul in two decades and to surprise herself in the first place with new constellations of old and fresh fragments.
Leylâ Gediz (born 1974 in Istanbul, Turkey) lives and works in Lisbon. She graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL (London, 1998) and Goldsmiths College (London, 1999). She has been exhibited in Istanbul, Los Angeles, Zurich, Helsinki and Amsterdam. Gediz is prominent in Turkey for her innovative research on painting as a contemporary practice. She is considered one of the major figures of the Turkish scene. Her work has been widely exhibited and is part of prestigious public and private collections such as Istanbul Modern, Arter (Istanbul), ARCO Foundation (Spain) and Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven).
THE PILL ® is a contemporary art gallery based in the historic peninsula of Istanbul near the Golden Horn. Founded in 2016 by Suela J.Cennet, the gallery functions as an international platform representing local and international artists. Initially envisioned as a mobile project space by its founder, it aims to create a fertile environment for multidisciplinary contemporary art, increase the visibility of the Turkish scene and enable relevant dialogue in the local context by increasing collaborations with other institutions in the region. and around the world, and by inviting international artists to think about their practice or experiment in a new territory.
In the autumn of 2022, the publishing house JBE Books published a book entitled NEW ART SCALES to mark the gallery’s sixth anniversary.