Exhibition at the city library for the Week of Foreign Fellow Citizens
By Birgit Wilms
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This article was published in German. The original text opens in a new tab in the German section of this website.
Grevenbroich. She signs her name with a sweeping flourish; the dots over the “ö” and “ü” turn into little curls.
With a strong stroke and in intense colors she creates her expressive pictures, which glow, almost scream. “My life is a struggle,” says the artist, yet she seems rather modest and reserved. But Gönül Sen has learned to assert herself again and again. In everyday life, with tenacity and small steps. In her art, with unmistakable expressive power. “In my pictures I am free,” she says. The freedom she means is not necessarily to be understood as an escape from her life situation. Her art is not a “niche” but rather the release of creative power, expressed in spatial tensions and garish color contrasts. There is the blue face hidden behind long green fingers: “Shame”. Or the grimace into which cramped fingers dig. And then “The Path”, which almost draws the viewer into the picture, or “The Louvre”, which seems almost to be on fire. Women are a recurring theme too – self-confident women, and women from her homeland who “have very little freedom – but they don’t fight”.
Gönül Sen should not be seen as a women’s rights activist who wants to herald a revolution. She knows the structures in her homeland too well for that, and respects the tradition of gender roles too much. But she wants to encourage people to unlock new possibilities in life. A fundamental experience that concerns people on this side of the Bosporus just as much.
After all, the artist combines experiences from her homeland and from Germany. Born in eastern Turkey in 1949, she studied at the art college in Istanbul from 1969 to 1973 and then worked as an art teacher there and in Samsun. In 1981 she came to Germany with her husband and child and studied for another four years at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. “That had always been a dream for me.” But she could not see any big differences; Istanbul is cosmopolitan, she says, and she had already enjoyed a modern education there.
Today the family lives in Cologne. Gönül Sen works as a language and art teacher at a secondary school; in the afternoons she is active in various groups and works five to six hours a day in her studio. More than 30 exhibitions in Cologne, Düsseldorf, Krefeld and most recently again in Istanbul have made her known. So it is also known that her pictures are not suitable as decorative accessories for a Turkish folklore festival but claim their own space and concentration.
“We are not seeing pictures from the Arabian Nights here,” Mayor Hans Gottfried Bernrath also noted in his speech at the city library, with which he also opened the Week of Foreign Fellow Citizens in Grevenbroich. Rather, he emphasized the opportunity such an exhibition offers to learn more about the people one has come to know in a process of getting used to each other, without knowing much more about them. An opportunity not only for the hosts and the Turks in Grevenbroich, but also for neighbors of other nationalities. How better to convey this than with music and with pictures that transcend language?
Original caption: This is how a woman sees “two women”: Gönül Sen and an exhibit from the exhibition, now on view at Galerie Stadtparkinsel (city library) as part of the Week of Foreign Fellow Citizens.
