Cigdem Mentesoglu
Cigdem Mentesoglu lives and works in Ankara (TR)
Cigdem Mentesoglu contemplates daily life, enjoys getting lost in the diversity of memories, experiences, and relationships between people. Her residency at La Friche allowed her to experiment with new directions. The concerns that inhabited her have expanded as she explores new territories, both physical and mental. Her works have also evolved. The artist indeed combines in a single work, paintings, drawings, collages, working on canvases, paper, both opaque and transparent, construction bags, exploding her formats and frames, offering spatial arrangements of her pieces, and thus reinventing her own space where intimacy and bodies are displayed, in motion. The artist’s body too is in perpetual motion. One can easily grasp this by contemplating her works, where the clear and continuous lines of the drawing are as if dissolved by color, often raw, and the material. She engages in a battle with the medium, clinging to her pencil as she would cling to reality. She scratches her canvases, adds material, glues, circles around the tense bodies she places in dark, anxious environments. The artist shows us a critical work, engaged with the world, a sensual and dreamlike work, an expressionist work, where the creative act seems to liberate her from her unconscious dreams and desires.
