ARTIST SENEM OEZDOGAN
Exploring light’s transformative quality as well as the emotional response its absence and presence creates.
Tel us about you Senem
I’m originally from Germany, but have been living and working in Brooklyn, NY, for the past few years. My show “The Night Paintings” is currently on view at LaunchF18 in New York. It’s a body of work I have been developing over the past one-and-a-half years and I’m excited about finally being able to share it. The primordial opposition of day and night, light and dark have long preoccupied the collective consciousness on a biological and psychological level — my new work excavates these emotional and physical phenomena, giving shape to the spectral space of night.
Your greatest inspirations or influences?
My greatest influences come from everything around me: the city I live in, the things I see, places I travel to, conversations I have — in some form, all of these impressions find their way into my work.
In a more general way, I am inspired by artists from various fields — writers and poets such as Rainer Maria Rilke and the choreographer Martha Graham. I’m a huge admirer of Caravaggio and Renaissance painting in general. The mastery of chiaroscuro — the creation of drama, mood, and atmosphere with the use of light and dark contrast in his work has always fascinated me. Human perception and vision and their exploration is a big part of my practice. How do I create a three-dimensional reality on a flat surface? How can I turn paint into light? How do I capture that transition, the moment when darkness and light start to fade? The exploration of light and dark contrasts and their impact on the viewer's perception have become important aspects of my work.
Tell us a bit about your creative process? Things you are looking forward to this year.
I enjoy working on a series and observing and experimenting over longer periods of time. Some pieces are like a one-way street — you follow it and it reaches an end. With others it just keeps going — they raise new questions and each new exploration creates a different response. Once I finish a piece it serves as a stepping-stone for the next one. I found that questions about the subject matter are raised and answered through the process of creation. Each drawing and painting is an opportunity to open a new door and go down a different path. My work is process-based and being receptive and curious helps to push the work forward.
Recently, my work has shifted from being about structure and form to being about content and emotion. I see this change mostly in my gradient paintings — in a way, it humanized the geometric work by turning shape into form, form into volume, and volume into emotion. It made me rethink the way I had worked with composition in the past and sparked a lot of new thoughts I’m excited to explore.
How has this year changed your creativity or how you see the world changing moving forward?
Most of my work is created with extreme control — once I move to the canvas there isn’t much room for experimentation. Most of the time I have very tight parameters for my work and it’s a process I really enjoy. Working on “The Night Painting” series was different in the sense that I didn’t restrict myself. I wanted the work to be gestural — visible layers of paint, pencil marks, and brush strokes. It was a very liberating experience.
Who do you consider to be an icon of our time?
To me, icons are people that have impacted their environment in profound ways and paved the way for others. I think the past year has shown us that icons don’t necessarily have to be people known to a large audience. I’ve been fortunate to have met some incredible people whose passion for their work and life has been extremely inspiring to me.
