Gönül Sen-Menzel: First Exhibition in Turkey 1987 – Review

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Gönül Şen, who gave up her job as an art teacher in Istanbul and settled in Germany in 1981, has opened her first exhibition in Turkey at Galerie Vepa.

After a year at the University of Cologne, Şen studied for four years at the Düsseldorf Art Academy and has held many exhibitions in Germany. Her exhibition comprises 32 acrylic paintings from recent years. Besides multi-figure impressions of European city life (the Paris metro, the Louvre, a cafeteria, the beach, on the steamer, etc.), figures and portraits from her surroundings – a painter-decorator, a guard, a hairdresser and others – take up a lot of space.

In Gönül Şen’s pictures, which put the surface in the foreground with warm and effective color tones, one senses in places a closeness to the reduced sense of color with which Fikret Mualla painted his Parisian life. In the series “Woman in Purple”, with few figures defined by white contours on red-and-black, broadly mottled grounds, more abstract relationships predominate. In Şen’s pictures one can recognize the searching attitude of a developing style that combines the depiction of figure and portrait with different spaces and semi-abstract color fields. Her training in Germany and her intensive artistic work visibly contribute to this.

The review appeared in 1987 on the occasion of the exhibition at the Istanbul gallery Vepa; the newspaper or magazine is not named on the clipping. Translated from Turkish for senmenzel.com.