Surface Tension

Uprise Art is proud to present Surface Tension by Senem Oezdogan. Oezdogan’s practice spans painting, fiber art, and drawing, returning to a common synthesis of questioning and distilling forms into what she describes as ‘primary structures'. This synthesis encompasses landscape and figures as well as human emotions and actions, where the seemingly invisible is magnified and transformed.

Oezdogan’s fiber works broadly approach architecture and the lived environment, where the structures described are both discrete objects and entire systems of movement and interchange. The pieces are constructed with rope wrapped around a wooden mount, which is in turn wrapped in thread to create the blocks of color that float and flood the surface. Despite a semblance to loom-woven textile, these pieces are wholly unique in their construction, allowing for the small colored threads to contrast with the weightier line of the rope.

Similarly, Oezdogan’s Gradients series evokes something self-evident and sculptural, a standalone object where the shifting color de-scribe grooves, channels, and curves on misty fields of color. Incorporating one or two colors at most, the works are strikingly un-painterly, smooth, and seemingly devoid of mark-making, like something uncovered or cast in steel. These static and motionless paintings still disclose a repetitive process of subtle blending and glazing and stand as a testament of time and energy condensed into a two-dimensional surface.

The translation of lived experience to simplified forms does not always land in these fixed and constant constructions: Oezdogan’s Line Drawings, for example, focus on color fields and the tension and release of crossing boundaries. These paintings on paper have the surface quality of straightforward, formalist abstraction, but with a loaded, subtle gloss -straight lines evoke rest and the static qualities of architecture, while the curved and shifting lines give a sense of frenetic and happenstance movement, or the sensuous qualities of the body.

Her graphic works on canvas possess a similar dynamism to the line drawings as the shapes and structures move in, through, and out of the canvas. Rooted in the real world, these shapes take on weight and shrug it off ambivalently. The flat shapes are both part of the referential and entirely removed from their environment, offering an idiomatic reality where presence and absence slide past one another effortlessly.

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