Known for her long-standing practice spanning painting, sculpture, drawing, and digital design, Yonca Saraçoğlu meets viewers at Galeri Işık Teşvikiye with her new solo exhibition Untold Tales. The exhibition brings together the artist’s recent oil paintings with selected sculptures from previous years for the first time within a cohesive framework.
A Layered Narrative
With Untold Tales, Saraçoğlu repositions her practice at a new aesthetic threshold, both conceptually and formally. Previously working with an expansive colour palette, the artist embraces a conscious reduction in this series, focusing on a more restrained chromatic range. This newly constructed visual language—shaped through a misty imagery in which blue-green harmonies are accompanied by yellow and purple—develops a narrative directed toward memory.
Untold Tales invites viewers into a layered narrative field that traces what is left untold and what cannot be contained within words. According to the artist, the exhibition constructs a multi-layered narrative space extending from meanings that have lost their subject and location to unspoken experiences, from silent catastrophes to invisibilised losses. This atmosphere resonates in both the paintings and the sculptures as timeless, contemplative, and profound.
“As a ‘solitary wanderer,’ I lost myself in labyrinths within a hazy, misty, uncertain, dreamlike atmosphere of blue and green harmonies accompanied by yellow and purple. There, I asked unintentional questions to the shadows I encountered. I found what I was not searching for; what I could not find, I am still searching for…”
Wordless and Silent Stories
Reflecting on the formation of the exhibition, Saraçoğlu shares:
“At this phase of my own journey, shaped by being animated and awakened within an ancient, layered city buried in crooked strata, I returned to my beloved imagined, fictional, escaped, lived, mystical, mysterious, utopian, wild, spiritual, uncontrollable—surreal to you, real to me—spaces. At the same time, I pursued what is lost in translation, what cannot be articulated, what remains wordless and silent. I traced meanings that have lost their place and subject, what cannot be confessed, what has no equivalent in language, silent catastrophes, the voided, the lost, and what is not deemed worthy of narration—what may sound like a tale to another.”
Untold Tales will be on view at Galeri Işık Teşvikiye until 27 February.
