Yasemin Cengiz Cagatay (@yasemin.c.cagatay) is a self-taught painter interested in painting the unknown. While painting portals into alien worlds, dream landscapes and new realities, she devises complex stories about the nature of being. There is never just one reading of her art. Her doodlings are like improve jazz riffs on a theme, and her work suggests ambiguity and ambivalence; she seeks new possibilities endlessly.  The artist addresses the timeless theme of power through hybrids of symbolic characters and nuanced allegory with a surrealist aesthetic, through stream of consciousness storytelling. Painting freely from her psyche, mining her unconscious for dreamlike imagery, she comes up with otherworldly compositions commenting ironically on human condition. 

Her works are infused with a dreamlike, surreal sensibility; and she dresses unsettling themes like power in sparkles, gemstones, and fantasy. Her kaleidoscopic images are a swirl of beauty and hinted violence, and she uses beasts, birds, butterflies, fish and flowers as well as dragon-bird creatures to animate her cartoon-like characters. She combines representation and abstraction, with a tendency towards gesturalism. She is influenced by diverse references, from Surrealists to contemporary artists Glenn Brown and Raqib Shaw, including futurists as well as symbolists like Vrubel. Seeing Surrealism as an opening to express her inner self, her mind’s eye likes to play: a compendium of images that are by turns poignant, comic, skillful, naïve, grotesque or elegant. None are what they seem at first sight. They are designed to provoke thought on the caprices of perception and mysteries of mental pleasure. 

While her bold paintings obviously look back to the painterly experimentation days, her imagery is also heavily influenced by the current video-game graphics; hence the contemporary end result. Her appreciation of the classical sublime drama is evident, but her imagery owing a lot to video game graphics is resolutely futuristic. Her signature style consisting of sinuous creatures which look both naturalistic and surreal enables her to create futurist vistas.Her figurative paintings show abstract elements, interacting on the pictorial plane, creating a deep, but ever changing pictorial space of multi-focal character. The viewer is forced to readjust his/her position at every new look. Her de-focalisation of the image is disconcerting; most of her paintings can be hung upside down and become a new painting. Her bold colors and sinuous forms further enhancing the bombastic effect of her intricately structured compositions; her work becomes more and more “hyper” like her, and also reflect her obsession with color. 

Artistic Process

Surrealist and futurist painting viewed from the perspective of the digital age, her paintings are painted with a digital brush. However, differently from most artists working with the digital medium, Cagatay does not use a multi-pronged process of first sourcing imagery online, and then manipulating it.  Born well before the digital age, - albeit on a Wacom pro tablet and with a digital brush- she  paints directly from her mind’s eye like every artist did before the digital age. Cagatay’s process is very intuitive.  She discovered that ‘thinking’ in the classical sense limits her, and she can only paint well when in a sort of trance, painting from her subconscious. Years of practice made this possible. Unable to harness her novelty seeking, ‘hyperfocus craving’ hyperactive mind prone to working insane hours, she is experimenting endlessly. To control her artistic output, the artist prints her digital paintings herself in her studio with her own large format HP Designjet, on museum quality Hahnemühle fine art paper, and doesn’t make editions.

Education

Yasemin Cengiz Cagatay grew up in Istanbul with an art teacher mother who surrounded her with paints, paintings and art history books. She taught her painting as a child, and introduced her to the work of the masters of the past, which inspired the artist from a young age; leading to national art prizes, including a first prize in a nation wide art competition when she was a high school senior. She has studied from 11 to 19 years old in Galatasaray Lycée, a major establishment having formed the politicians and artists of the country. She had the opportunity to use the school’s art studio on the Bosphorus exclusively. The French influence she received in this centuries old school with a blend of French and Turkish curricula reflects in her paintings. She has been invited to the major art school of the country, but studied at Bosphorus University Business School.The artist pursued a finance management career for a decade, working as a management committee member for multinational companies. With the birth of her second child she decided to quit, and indulge in her passion for art.He is now the third generation artist of the family, an artist who  studied at NYU Tisch School of the Arts Film&TV department.

The artist gave herself a tailored, eclectic art education spanning two decades, living in art centers - Paris, London and New York- and studied contemporary art at the summer programs of IESA Paris, Sotheby’s Institute of Art London and NewYork. She embarked in a ’Grand Tour’ in Europe like the painters of previous centuries; and taught herself painting in the museums including Paris, Madrid, Berlin, London and NewYork art museums, spending a lot of time observing the work of the masters. Bosphorus University’s rich curriculum giving her a strong base in Humanities, she has been able to continue studying, especially psychology and art history. Her previous training in art has enabled the artist to set up her own art studio after a decade in a completely different career who enriched her mind by providing a challenging experience.

Exhibition History

The artist’s frenzied yearning to wed the eternal with the coming day -the same desire shared by many painters- and her devotion to constant questioning pushed her to paint for a long time before exhibiting her work. Although her preoccupation with the twin modes of analogue and digital painting in relation to representational iconographies spans a decade, the artist preferred to have her inaugural  exhibition with the gallery she co-founded. She started with All Arts Istanbul art fair in 2013, where she showed her digital and analogue paintings sharing her futuristic vision side by side. She then had exhibited her work both solo or in group at her art gallery and at Contemporary Istanbul 2014,2019 , 2020 and 2021 and also in Scope New York 2020 with a solo presentation. Her Scope NY exhibition Painting Other Universes has been selected as Editor's Choice by Online Viewing Room featuring Scope NY 2020.She then also participated to Virtual Contemporary Istanbul and Bodrum Art and Antiques Fair in 2021.She also exhibited her work at Kethüda Hammam alongside Yücel Kale's sculptures in December 2022, and finally had another solo exhibition in Bon Vivant İzmir in January 2023.

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