Gardenscapes, which opened at Dirimart Dolapdere, is a space designed with a particular sensitivity that draws the viewer deep into its interior. The layered surfaces so often encountered in Ulusoy’s practice appear this time not only on canvas but as a universe that touches the gallery’s own architecture and reconstructs the space itself. Fragments gathered from everyday life, the deep traces of the geography she inhabits, and that fine, vibrating line between abstraction and reality determine the entire rhythm of Gardenscapes.
Ulusoy’s paintings always speak through a question of memory: images that surface and vanish on the canvas, where individual and collective memory intertwine, make palpable the constantly undulating flow of time. The alliance formed by materials such as jute, beeswax and sand with oil and acrylic paint creates a depth that touches the fragility of abandoned spaces. This aesthetic, where Eastern and Western painterly sensibilities meet on the same surface, carries both a harmonious and contradictory unity—just like the delicate tension between nostalgia and disorientation in the artist’s works.
The exhibition opens with Ulusoy’s book OVERWORKED, published in 2025; this volume of photographs, found images and collages serves as a kind of entrance gate to the artist’s mental archive. The transfer of the fragmented images on its pages into a physical plane in the exhibition pulls the viewer inside the images. This is no longer merely a visual trail; it is an experience that surrounds, touches and seeps into the space.
The garden Ulusoy constructs is far from a traditional sense of arrangement. It is a universe that multiplies the distance between nature and the built environment, at times unsettling, even redefining borders. Like a screen: sharply delineated yet composed with intuitive attention, a fantastical zone of escape. Glossy surfaces evoke both water and a digital sensation, while the warmth of the paintings offers the viewer a balancing point of attachment. This double pull—between cold and warm, artificial and natural, reality and imagination—forms the exhibition’s central spirit.
At the far end of the space, a video and sound installation provides a quiet yet intense pause that completes the experience. Images that appear and disappear in the darkness expand the world of the paintings as if completing the missing branches of a tree; the viewer is invited to reconstruct the garden within themselves. Ulusoy’s garden does not carry a single meaning; on the contrary, it offers a space for contemplation that finds its place in the calm of uncertainty.
Gardenscapes is a silent journey that invites the viewer not merely to an exhibition but into the layers of intuition, memory and time. It remains on view at Dirimart Dolapdere until 23 November 2025.
