From the colour-explosion coasts of South Africa to Istanbul’s Pera district… Georgina Gratrix: Oyalantı Resimleri (Sunday Paintings), opening at Dirimart Pera, makes the artist’s mischievous yet fearless painting language powerfully visible in Istanbul for the first time.
In Gratrix’s world, nothing is quiet. Flowers shout, birds leap forward with their colours, dogs demand to be the star of the scene, and everyday objects come alive on the canvas as if secretly cast in a hidden role. A high dose of irony, boldly layered paint surfaces, and the playful tension between “kitsch” and beauty transform this exhibition from a mere aesthetic space into a full sensory realm.
The choice of the title “Oyalantı Resimleri” is no coincidence. With a subtle nod to the English term “Sunday painting,” the title both inverts the perception of the amateur painter and carries the rhythm of Gratrix’s most prolific, most liberated moments. Sunday stillness is turned on its head in her paintings into an exuberant overflow; the most banal images of daily life find new existence beneath sculptural mounds of paint.
The works in the exhibition reflect Gratrix’s observant stance. Vases that appear in her studio, flower arrangements, her dogs, the birds in her garden, even a photograph hanging on the wall—all suddenly become performers stealing the spotlight on the canvas.
Every figure is slightly exaggerated, slightly chaotic, slightly “too much.” Yet precisely because of this, the paintings evoke a heartfelt sense of familiarity in the viewer: playful, gently strange, and utterly distinctive.
Gratrix’s use of colour is the exhibition’s most striking character. The pleasure of a tropical geography, the light humour of everyday life, and an expressionist construction all converge on a single surface. It’s not just paint; glitter, beads, fragments of jewellery… Every material carries a memory, an emotion, a game. The surface of the paintings openly conveys the artist’s “tactile” insistence: the viewer looks but simultaneously feels the urge to touch.
Oyalantı Resimleri is more than a visual exhibition; it is an invitation into the artist’s intimate, ironic, and often playful relationship with painting. The formal messiness on the canvas is in fact a deliberate zone of freedom. Gratrix does not idealise beauty; she bends it, rebuilds it, sometimes breaks it. And from the heart of that very intervention emerges a far more authentic aesthetic.
The exhibition blurs the boundaries between figure and abstraction; colour, material, and form become an energy that circulates around the painting. Its dialogue with the space of Dirimart Pera further amplifies this energy: the works flow along the gallery walls in an almost rhythmic procession; the gaze glides seamlessly from one painting to the next.
“Georgina Gratrix: Oyalantı Resimleri” is on view at Dirimart Pera until 14 December 2025.
For anyone wishing to explore this colourful, ironic, and playful world stretching from South Africa to Istanbul, the exhibition is one of the city’s most vibrant stops on the autumn art calendar.
