Arzu Başaran, 1963

Arzu Başaran graduated from the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts (Department of Painting) in 1985. She went to Rome in 1989 on an Italian government grant where she undertook research at the Museum of Modern Art.

Although in her earliest work she painted stylized women's bodies using seemingly crude and primitive animal motifs, Başaran is usually associated with the New Expressionism movement that developed after 1980. She approaches personal and social issues critically, and uses a free language of expression in her pictures, which are realized using paint. Her work, although minimal in terms of image, is charged with complex statements.

In the 1990s she attempted to bring a fresh point of view to portraiture traditions by depicting faces that seem to surge from the unknown and which she discovers while she paints. With compositions done using red thread portraying figures hanging from the surface of the wall or suspended loosely in the air, the artist has embarked on a new quest pertaining to the diverse dramatic and everyday reflections of human reality. In her work entitled Web, forms made of thread combine with the visuality of the spider web. At the center of the image is a stylized female figure enveloped in a linear structure with emotional and semantic references. The act of replication calls to mind the fact that the same silhouette assumes different identity roles and hints at an attitude whose intention is to call attention to women and their world.