In early 2024, I began developing a new body of work for its presentation at ArtAnkara International Contemporary Art Fair.

Preparing several works to exist together changed the way I approached each individual piece.

Until then, I often thought about a painting as a complete world of its own. This time, I began to think about what happens between works — how colour moves from one surface to another, how forms respond to each other, and how separate pieces can create a larger visual rhythm.

The human figure also began to appear more clearly within my abstraction.

Not as portraiture, but as fragments of connection: two forms approaching one another, separating, overlapping or leaving space between them.

I was interested in how little information is actually necessary for us to recognise something human.

A contour. A distance. A gesture.

Sometimes abstraction can remove almost everything — and still leave enough for us to recognise ourselves.

Preparing this body of work for ArtAnkara became an important step in understanding that possibility.

The less literally I described the human figure, the more space there was for someone else to enter the work.