Gönül Sen-Menzel: The Poetic Power of a Moving Soul

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City Center. Gönül Sen-Menzel let colors flow lightly across the canvas to create landscapes full of movement.

The field glows red and the light of the sky blue-violet, cloud and sun hovering in flight. No one who falls under the spell of the enormous vitality of her painting would guess that the life of the Cologne artist with Turkish roots ended last year.

The paintings can be seen in a small exhibition in memory of Gönül Sen-Menzel at the Gulliver homeless shelter. The venue, which has hosted remarkable art presentations for many years, was not chosen by chance. Rather, it is meant to express an important trait of Sen-Menzel’s outlook on life: her strong sense of justice and her commitment to the socially disadvantaged.

Born in eastern Turkey in 1949, the artist campaigned passionately for women’s rights and against oppression, and showed considerable moral courage in doing so. Because the enormous diversity and abundance of her complete body of work would go far beyond the scope of the Gulliver venue, the emphasis lies above all on landscape painting. It gives a good impression of Menzel’s painterly power, carried by the restlessness and poetry of a moving soul and her longing for harmony and calm.

Here the wide field appears in a multicolored, flat structure, while abstracted straw bales peer out of it like eyes. In another picture, the painterly emphasis lies on the horizon line, expressing the relationship between heaven and earth both as an opposition and as a reconciling tension. A city scene, too, can be depicted as a landscape – such as the calm bustle on a square, where a touch of circus lightness seems to rise up in the middle of the big city. In this and other paintings, people and houses appear as nameless, fleeting silhouettes.

With sweeping painterly gestures, Gönül Sen-Menzel captured the essential forms of a scene: here a hill, a blue river and a few trees, there people, power pylons and houses. In this manner she stood firmly in the tradition of painterly Expressionism, which developed at the beginning of the 20th century as an expression of the deepest human emotion. At times she even pushes expressive depiction to the edge of extreme abstraction, yet without ever entirely giving up figuration. A silvery fountain of color, for instance, swirls up into the air, placing the principle of an unpredictable explosive force at the center of our perception. In contrast to so much turbulence, Sen-Menzel also shows the romantic side of expressive painting, in a violet sky with a white-and-orange moon.

With her light-handed style, Sen-Menzel influenced numerous young painters in the Cologne art scene who regularly attended courses in her studio in Volkhoven-Weiler. She told these students that what matters above all is to let go completely and paint with great physical energy. She showed what that means herself shortly before her death when, in an open-air performance on Pariser Platz in Chorweiler, she captured at breakneck speed the movements of a dancer performing at the same time. Thoroughly trained in the craft of artistic techniques at the Teachers’ College in Istanbul and at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, she left no doubt that in painting one must follow feeling rather than intellectual concepts. With a few but outstanding works, the exhibition at Gulliver shows what makes sincere painting so magical.

Überlebensstation Gulliver, Trankgasse 20, railway arch 1 / Hohenzollern Bridge, open Mon–Fri 6 a.m.–1 p.m. and 3–8 p.m., Sat and Sun 10 a.m.–6 p.m., until April 12

About the Artist

Gönül Sen-Menzel was born in eastern Turkey in 1949. In 1981 she came to Germany as a political refugee and lived in Cologne from then on. Having already worked as an art teacher in Turkey, she completed a second course of study at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in the 1980s. Vibrant color, nude studies, music and rhythm are central to her artistic work. Gönül Sen-Menzel died in March 2014. (jk)