Gözde Yıldırım

Who is Gözde Yıldırım? (1992-Mersin)

Born in Tarsus, Mersin, Gözde Yıldırım began her art education at the Painting Department of Mersin Nevit Kodallı Fine Arts High School. After completing her basic art education, she gained expertise in form and volume disciplines by studying Sculpture at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Mersin University in 2011. She completed her undergraduate studies in Painting and Art Education at Mustafa Kemal University in 2018 and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Painting at the Institute of Fine Arts, Mersin University.

Yıldırım’s artistic practice centers on the theme of “the formation of memories” as a conceptual focal point. Translating the traces of the past, the layers of memory, and the transformation of memories over time into a visual language, the artist produces her works with an interdisciplinary approach. Throughout her career, Yıldırım’s works have been exhibited in numerous national and international group exhibitions, and she has documented her artistic success with awards received from national competitions. The artist, who continues her work in Mersin, explores the connection between individual and collective memory with a modern aesthetic.

Art Perspective:

My art is actually about that invisible world we all carry within us, that is, memories. I don’t look at memories like old, dusty photographs in an album. For me, memory is like a living organism that constantly moves, bends, reshapes itself every time we remember, and builds us from within. Every time I stand in front of the canvas, I try to capture “how a memory changes form in our minds and bodies.” In this journey, I draw much intellectual inspiration from two great masters, Salvador Dalí and Yayoi Kusama.

Dalí’s rule-breaking surreal world, his dissolution of time and space, reminds me how flexible and elusive memory is. Our memories, like his melting clocks, bend and twist as time passes. Kusama, on the other hand, represents the deeper, more captivating, intense aspect of it for me. I see in her repetitive world how a feeling, a fragment of memory, can create an endless cycle in the mind. I want to combine these two feelings in my paintings: the dreamlike fluidity of memory and the intense, sometimes obsessive, rhythm of our inner world. But how does this completely abstract state in the mind transform into a concrete reality on the canvas? This is where Jenny Saville, from whom I draw formal and technical inspiration, comes into play. Memories aren’t just thoughts flying around in our heads; each has a physical counterpart. The tightness or relief we feel when we remember something is entirely a physical process.

Inspired by Saville’s powerful, layered brushstrokes, I deliberately break down my figures, deforming the forms and disrupting the smoothness we’re accustomed to, creating layered, organic textures, just like memory itself. Ultimately, what I want to do is bring that fragmented, sometimes distorted, but always very real structure of memory in the mind to life on canvas. I want the viewer, when looking at my paintings, not to see just a painted figure; Let them feel their own past, their own inner ruptures, and the hidden corners of their memory among those layers.