Ece Özel : Self Titled

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.

Özel studied at Avni Akyol Fine Arts High School and the Painting Department of Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University. She worked as a stylist in the fashion industry for a long time and has been actively pursuing her DJ career for about 20 years.

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.

Müge Büyüktalaş