When I entered the MERKUR Gallery in Istanbul, the exhibition had already been open for a while. I was there to meet Nilüfer Yıldırım. The prospect of discussing the works in the same space with an artist whose practice I have followed with admiration was genuinely exciting. "Human Landscapes" communicates its central idea at first glance; figures, distances and surfaces immediately make this orientation visible to the viewer.
We begin walking through the gallery together. At times, we stand silently in front of a work; at others, we step back a few paces to look from a distance. This is not a question-and-answer format, but rather a conversation formed by moving among the works. It is a state that aligns with her mode of production: a way of thinking that is not fixed, not read from a single point, but constantly in motion.
What is felt first in Nilüfer Yıldırım’s paintings is a deliberate ambiguity between figuration and abstraction. The works are neither fully figurative nor entirely abstract. There is a suggestion of the human body, yet this suggestion never settles into a clearly defined form.
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