Working across painting, printmaking and drawing, Zeynep Ozkan builds brief, evocative episodes that are sensuous and intimate. Her paintings are a way to acknowledge and cherish the subtle, transitory nature of life.

Intuition, colour and memory are fundamental parts of  her process. She starts with quick observational drawings that are bare, leaving room for her to be inventive when re-working them in the studio using predominantly oil paint. She is interested in conveying the essence with the rawest and most direct kinds of marks, painterly gestures, and abstract forms.


She works fast adopting a wet-on-wet technique using gestural and economical brushwork. Although her work often starts from something observed, it does not attempt to truthfully recreate reality. Instead, she is concerned with capturing the ‘particularity’ of a moment blending elements of reality with imagination. An image, story or form emerging from lived experiences has the potentiality of carrying a deeper dimension within. It is this potentiality that inspires her. She aspires her work to occupy a space between a realist sense that there are people and things in the world that can be known, and a modernist attention to layers and brushstrokes, and the flatness of paint.

zeynep.ozkan@gmail.com

︎ @zozkan

Education

2019      The Royal Drawing School, London, Postgraduate Scholarship, The Drawing Year.

2000    MA in Philosophy UCL, London, UK