Cosa Mentale

COSA MENTALE

Leylâ Gediz

09.11.2022 — 23.12.2022

Opening 8, November 2022
6:30 — 8:30 pm

Preceded by a conversation with the artist, Asli Seven &
Cristina Sanchez-Kozyreva — 5:30 pm

L’ATLAS
4 cour de l’île Louviers
75004 Paris

T H E P I L L ® is pleased to announce Leylâ Gediz’s first solo show in Paris with the gallery at L’Atlas.

Intrigued by the shifts of diasporic beings across the world, Leylâ Gediz is devoted to expanding the field of painting, its settings, and its audiences.
The exhibition gathers recent works spanning from paintings to video and site-specific interventions and explores the artist’s ongoing research on contemporary painting, embracing notions such as displacement by addressing them through the lens of her personal life broadened to collective narratives.
On this occasion, the artist will display a new body of works that reflect on the possibilities of being unrooted.
Leylâ Gediz is an archaeologist of every day fragments excavating the emotions they emanate. These fragments are played out by random, found, mundane yet useful objects, people close to her heart, light and shadow humans and objects cast on each other, their – sometimes awkward – volume in space, memories and stories they trigger. They come from different backgrounds, from different moments in time to be masterfully carved out of their literal and metaphorical backgrounds. How they build each other anew in relation within the particular space of still life painting is humble, precise and magical at the sametime. They are too real to be unreal, hovering in that fragile zone between fiction and non-fiction.
«Affected perspective» may be a useful term for the humble magic Leylâ Gediz enacts in her new series of paintings realised in her studio in Lisbon; where she relocated together with her family a few years ago.
In this exhibition, the artist continues to explore her desire to create a new space for open constellations in her work, to take a serene and critical distance towards what she has produced in Istanbul in two decades and to surprise herself in the first place with new constellations of old and fresh fragments.

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A conversation between the artist, curator Asli Seven and writer Cristina Sanchez-Kozyreva will take place at 5:30 pm on Tuesday 8, November.
The talk will be held in English and French.

Leylâ Gediz (b.1974 Istanbul, Turkey) is a Turkish visual artist known for her innovative research into painting as a contemporary practice. She is considered as one of the most prominent artists from Turkey.
She completed her MA in Visual Arts at Goldsmiths College (London, 1999) and a BA in Fine Art (Painting)at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL (London, 1998). She had solo exhibitions in Istanbul, Los Angeles,Zurich, Helsinki and Amsterdam. Her work has been widely exhibited and is included in prestigiouspublic and private collections such as Istanbul Modern, Arter (Istanbul), ARCO Foundation (Spain) and VanAbbemuseum (Eindhoven).

Asli Seven is an independent curator and writer based between Istanbul and Paris. Her research and projects focus on infrastructural forms of violence embodied within landscape and built environment, with an emphasis on fieldwork, ficto-criticism and collaborative artistic processes. She is the recipient of CNAP & Cité Internationale des Arts grant and residency program (2020-21). She holds a doctoral level degree in ArtisticResearch from ENSA Bourges and EESI Poitiers-Angouleme in France (2019). She is a member of AICA and acollaborator with Independent Curators International.

Cristina Sanchez-Kozyreva is an art critic and journalist, and the occasional curator. She is the editor-in-chief of Curated!, thefirst NFT newsletter at the intersection with the traditional contemporary art world. She’s also the editor-in-chief of curator-focused Curtain magazine, and she’s a regular contributor to Contemporânea, Frieze, and Artforum, among others. From 2009 to 2016 she cofounded and was the editor-in-chief of Pipeline, a print art magazine in Hong Kong.

Reproductions: João Neves

Installation views: Rebecca Fanuele and Leyla Gediz