Keep it a Secret: Leyla Gediz

Galerist would like to announce an exhibition of new works. This will be Leyla Gediz’s second solo exhibition at the gallery’s premises.

Keep it a Secret invites viewers to glide through a passageway of canvasses. Already having found herself a niche in contemporary painting, Gediz is pushing the limits of figuration and abstraction still further. Binding critical content with naïve expression, she stands at the crossroads of connotations, from where she rides us into the subtexts of visual culture.

Her paintings in Keep it a Secret offer partial stories and hidden aspects that flourish upon response. For Gediz the exhibition itself is a site of partly held secrets, suggesting that any dialogue with the viewer will be an intimate one. The cubicles of the gallery space surround that intimacy, and the spell is spread from one painting to another. The exhibition performs as a platform for continious transgession between what’s remembered and what’s replaced. The melancholy of the ageless figure, who is caught between worlds and desires (Doppelgänger), a grey skyscraper that can be from anywhere, and the unsettling challenge of Frigo all hint at Leyla Gediz’s curious motives. Connecting and disconnecting, Keep it a Secret calls to play each viewer’s own secrets, lies, desires and fears.

Leyla Gediz is born in İstanbul in 1974. After studying four years of painting in University of London, UCL, Slade School of Fine Arts; she has written her master thesis on the roles of gender in production , taking an MA degree from the Visual Arts Department, Goldsmiths College.

Exhibition includes the latest works by the artist, and can be visited at Galerist between 16th of October and 15th of November.

A catalogue including text by Mika Hannula, will be published on the occasion of the exhibition.