Senem Oezdogan “The Night Paintings”

Launch F18

[Image: Senem Oezdogan "Untitled" (2021) Acrylic on canvas 50 x 38 in.]

This event has ended.

LAUNCH F18 and Uprise Art are pleased to present The Night Paintings, an exhibition of new work by Senem Oezdogan. In her paintings, Oezdogan employs precise color relationships to explore the absence and presence of light and the alluring mystery of night.

Like eyes adjusting to darkness, Oezdogan’s paintings reveal themselves slowly. Cloaked in rich hues of indigo, the paintings are punctuated with radiant pricks of vermillion and ochre tinged yellows. Deep maroons reverberate against the nearly black blues, both simultaneously receding and advancing forward into space. This optical dissonance disrupts the viewer’s understanding of Oezdogan’s constructed planes, alluding to the disorienting quality of the decreased visibility in darkness.

The primordial opposition of day and night, light and dark has long preoccupied the collective consciousness on a biological and psychological level. Oezdogan’s paintings excavate these emotional and physical phenomena, giving shape to the spectral space of night.