Gönül Sen at the Bonn Künstlerhaus
By Jürgen Schön
Read the German original ↗
This article was published in German. The original text opens in a new tab in the German section of this website.
Cityscapes and people in everyday life – these are the central themes in the pictures of the Turkish artist Gönül Sen, which are being exhibited at the Bonn Künstlerhaus.
People can be seen in a café, working together or visiting a hospital. The outlines are put on the canvas in a few overlapping strokes, a quick, dynamic process. The result is an impression of casualness that carries over to the motif. For what matters most to the artist, who has lived in Cologne for seven years, are the colors: high in contrast, dull and garish, light and dark, but always extremely nuanced in themselves. Sometimes they seem to literally burst the limiting outlines; elsewhere they withdraw into the picture.
These tensions not only give the pictures their spatial depth. The colors – anything but realistic at first glance – also give the pictures the nevertheless realistic atmosphere that captivates the viewer. Take the violet and brown asphalt and the green, ocher and violet sky in her picture of a road construction site: that’s not what it really looks like. And yet it looks exactly like that: cramped, threatening, eerie. Or her “Piano Player”: red, purple and blue dominate the picture, creating a mood of loneliness that settles over empty elegance. In Gönül Sen’s drawings, too, it is above all her handling of color that convinces the viewer: the artist draws an almost unbelievable variety of gradations from black ink. (until Nov. 15)
