Leyla Gediz, 1974

After graduating from the Austrian High School Leyla Gediz attended the Chelsea College of Art and Design and the Slade School of Fine Art in London, and then Goldsmiths College where she studied for her master’s degree.

Leyla Gediz regards art not so much as a way of expressing her emotions but as an escape valve for venting them. Her works tend to be psychological compositions that are fraught with an intense, self-generated melancholy. Taking her own life story as their starting point, Gediz’s paintings are characterized by their photorealism. They also explore the notion of memory and also whether – and to what degree – the mind can obliterate visual recollections. A viewer senses that Gediz works through symbols and that these symbols are charged with a meaning known only to her. Black, white, gray, light blue and hues of pink that frequently appear in her narrow color palette are directly related to the nostalgia and emotion of the subject she deals with in her paintings. Bringing together her latest paintings and installations in a complementary context, the artist considers them both individually and as parts of a whole. The curiosity and the sense of continuity evoked by the story the artist creates about the whole of her works constitute their focal point.

Painting relates to her life, while the subjects and objects of those paintings correspond with those in her life as well. In “Geneva”, she shows us an interior that seems somehow familiar, and yet is not entirely comprehensible. The setting of a work is as crucially to Gediz as painting. In “Geneva” she presents us with a psychological study of a melancholy scene.