Gönül Sen-Menzel: Color as a Scream

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Kaiserswerth. The Big Bang could not have been louder than the colors in the pictures of the Turkish artist Gönül Sen, which assail the viewer’s eye with brute force.

The word “kitsch” quickly comes to mind, but that is exactly when what at first seemed so shrill begins to reveal a life of its own.

The eye, now used to the dynamism of the colors, first vaguely and then ever more clearly perceives the contours of a symbolism of strength. Metaphorically, the color turns itself inside out and screams its theme into the room. Color as a scream breaks the silence of a childhood and gives the desire for freedom, for liberation, the means of excess.

Finding Her Own Way the Hard Way

“I grew up in Turkey, and as a woman I could only find my way with great difficulty under the constraints of tradition, culture and religion,” says Gönül Sen. Her father was an officer, and the family lived in barracks. Shaped by such lack of freedom, the artist prevailed against her father and studied art and education in Istanbul. But when the pressure remained and even began to influence her art, the young painter decided in 1981 to go to Germany.

From 1983 to 1989 the young Turkish woman studied as a master student of Professor Schiff at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where she met Professor Günter H. Blecks. “From him I learned to release my scream through colors,” Gönül Sen recalls. The art professor, she says, is the red dot in her artistic work. Red, a color that, according to the painter, helps her pictures to formulate a statement. Experiments with car paints and industrial colors mark the artist’s idiosyncratic path, a path of trials and further development. What Gönül Sen wants are large pictures, strong, unorthodox color compositions – but above all nothing ordinary, only what is new and unusual.

Bursts of Color and Oversized Formats

Her childhood, with all its restrictive dogmas, unnatural for a strong person, made Gönül Sen pick up the brush and work out and document her freedom through bursts of color and oversized formats. The exhibition can be seen until March 23, Wednesdays to Saturdays from 2 to 6 p.m., at Annachrista Kroll-Buchholz’s gallery for Eastern European art.

Original caption: Works by the Turkish artist Gönül Sen.