Colour appears in the current works of Sibel Kocakaya (*1986 in Istanbul, lives and works in Bern and Basel). This is also reflected in the exhibition title ‹Chroma of Duality›, whereby a duality between reality and fiction is involved. Since 2022, when the artist worked as an artist in residence at the Walzwerk in Basel, colour has been an essential component of her painting and photography as well as her objects and installations. She uses a trick to achieve this: an alter ego, a figure she invented herself. «Izabelle Reusser», as she is called, even runs her own Instagram account and has a special sense of colour, which she also encourages the artist to use. Colours range from dark to light, from shimmering to bright and in some works appear in different facets. The artist explores their various qualities and effects on our perception, depending on the incidence of light, space and surface.

Against this background, Galerie Bernhard Bischoff & Partner is particularly pleased about the further collaboration with Sibel Kocakaya. Her colour explorations are as playful and lively as they are reflective and harmonious.

The artist comes across her motifs in her immediate surroundings, where she photographs them and then works on them in the studio. These are impressions from her travels, walks and journeys, as well as her stations in life: Istanbul, Paris, Lyon, Zurich and Bern. The focus is on architecture, from antiquity to the present and future; its structures and spaces, which become stages in the artist’s pictures.

The series «Fluid Structures», «Claros» and «Overhang» (each 2023) initially feature black and white scenes: photographs of the Casasayas Art Nouveau building in Palma (Mallorca) from 1910, an ancient place of worship and a rocky seashore. The colour comes from the glazed overpainting with acrylic ink. Sometimes the areas, splashes and drops look like a spontaneous idea, sometimes like a long-cherished thought; sometimes bold, sometimes as if breathed. They always change and expand the pictorial spaces and our perception, multi-layered complex and yet finely translucent.

In the «Path» series (2023), Sibel Kocakaya reflected on the walls as spatial boundaries that simultaneously open up paths for us, both inwards and outwards from the room. The fluorescent-coloured contours may illustrate this and lend the angles and spatial alignments a special aura. The paths also lead to supposedly personal motifs, as suggested by picture titles such as «I found you / you found me» (2022) or «Tomorrow Can Wait» (2023). With set pieces from architecture and nature, they are all the more open to our own interpretation. In «Imperfect Harmony», the artist appears under a historical column. Is the weighty stone a symbol of artistry or is it also associated with the idea of a burden that she carries on her shoulders? «Enigmatic Realm» (2024) literally points to «enigma». The artist appears life-size, with her head and feet not in the picture and a dove flying out of her abdomen. A scene similar to a surrealistically enigmatic dream image.

The artist was decisively influenced by her «discovery» of aluminum wire mesh a few years ago. Soft and pliable, she lets the fabric-like material shimmer in different coloured light and forms futuristic amorphous architectures or abstract sculptures from it, as in the photographs «Pavillon» (2021) and «Flexible Stucture» (2023). She also uses the mesh to stage entire rooms or herself, artfully loosely wrapped, as in the photographs «Clemency in The Night» and «untitled» (both 2023). In «Presentation a Model of Futuristic Building» (2023), she combines her painting in black and white with an architectural model in colour. The scenery goes back to an early Christian depiction, where Mary and Jesus are offered the Hagia Sophia and the city of Constantinople in model size. Once again, near and far, past, present and future come together, which Sibel Kocakaya subtly composes in her art.

Marc Munter, 2024