Selma Gürbüz, 1960-2021

Born in Istanbul in 1960, Selma Gürbüz began studying art at the Exeter College of Art and Design in the UK. She graduated from Marmara University in 1984 with a degree in fine art. She currently works in Istanbul and Paris. In her paintings Gürbüz uses a contemporary language to reinterpret and problematize archetypal figures that have made their way into cultural memory. She attempts to offer a new perspective on the relationship between outwardly manifested symbols and visual culture and the way memory operates.

Her works synthesize characteristics of eastern and western art. Stencil-like figures painted in one go, displaying decorative elements reminiscent of embroidery; symbols attributed to cultures of the East and West; silhouettes placed on colored backgrounds like pieces of décor; imaginary shadows extracted from different strata of time and culture, robbed of their roots; plants that reference an indistinct nature; living beings the existence and meaning of which we cannot be sure; all these bring mythic connotations to the accumulated, schematized characters arranged in various sizes and depths in layers on Gürbüz’s surfaces. Without

discriminating between geographies and cultures, she redesigns symbols born through behavioral patterns over generations. Gürbüz attempts to discover present-day counterparts of archetypes found in dream interpretations, ancient myths, visual arts, literature, and cultural studies. Hers are new, hybrid scenes of which we cannot quite make out the meaning but to which we feel a certain affinity the moment we see them.