SANEM ALTAYLI

Sanem Altaylı’s solo exhibition titled “GRİ” is on view at Galeri Soyut Hall A between October 10 and 21, 2025. Bringing the ordinary yet unforgettable moments of everyday life into her paintings, Altaylı reinterprets Ankara’s multi-layered atmosphere with tones of “gray.” Through lights filtering from behind curtains, reflective surfaces, and interlocking spaces, the artist invites the viewer into the folds of her own memory. GRİ presents a visual map of both individual memory and the city’s shared sense of time.

GRİ:

Yesterday / Today: Looking at Everyday Life to Remember

Sanem Altaylı’s compositions focus on capturing the spontaneous moments of everyday life.

She seeks to immortalize details that everyone sees but rushes past without noticing or caring about, and forces us to rethink the individual memories and historical periods evoked by those moments. As we look at what we see within the frame, she tries to reveal what is in our own memory.

In Altaylı’s paintings, we encounter a translucent curtain filtering through a shop or window at times, and a reflection falling on a building facade or an ordinary object at others. These visual filters make the image familiar on the one hand, while multiplying and alienating it on the other.

These layers, where human figures and spaces overlap, create a familiar yet dreamlike atmosphere and draw the viewer into layers of personal memory or collective moments.

In the coffeehouse, the uncles shuffle playing cards with the same patience, indifference, and weariness for decades. On the ice at the fishmonger stalls and beneath the yellow lightbulbs, it is as if the exact same fish always lie. But we see them each time in a different time period and mood; while holding our mother’s hand and carrying a primary school bag, while going to meet university friends, and while trying to rush our own child to the hospital, just for a fleeting moment.

Buildings are demolished, new people are born, and a different team becomes the champion that year. Ankara Castle, meanwhile, falls beneath the exact same haze every October, and that same scent of soot always begins to rise.

Fleeting moments turn into lasting feelings.

GRİ consists of a small collection of moments from Ankara’—which is always accused of being gray—that become colorful or colorless depending on who is looking.