Ayşen Gürdal

Ayşen Gürdal is a contemporary artist whose story, which began in Munich, soon turns into a journey that takes her back and forth between two cities, where cultures, languages, and emotions intertwine. Since childhood, words, colors, and little stories have been her playground. As an adult, this playground gradually evolves into a natural bridge connecting education, psychology, and art.

Born in Munich, Ayşen Gürdal graduated from Marmara University with a degree in German Language Teaching and worked for many years at Dialog Education in the fields of language instruction, expat consulting, and coaching. Gürdal, who began her artistic journey in 2021 with Ayça Şen's workshop and took it to an academic level with a Master's degree in Painting from FMV Işık University, blends language, psychology, and philosophy into her art. Following numerous group exhibitions, she opened her first solo exhibition, titled \"Bozuk Yüzey,\" at 8artı1 Gallery in 2025; the same year, she launched the “Galaktik Dasein” performance project. Continuing her creative work in her studios in Istanbul and Urla, the artist continues to explore inner transformation and the fragility of the surface in her works.

Ayşen Gürdal’s paintings do not convey a seamless unity; rather, they bear the traces of fractured, scattered, and intertwined emotions. Colours, layers and textures settle onto the surface as abstract reflections of these emotions. Rather than depicting the external world directly, she conveys the reflection of the emotions it evokes within her. Within a layered, fragile, dense and sometimes disorganised structure, the disruption of the surface and the fragmentation of emotions intertwine. Figures sometimes vanish, sometimes fade—the familiar becomes indistinct through distortion. Ayşen is in pursuit of the emotions lingering behind the visible, of the human traces dissolving within the layers. What is distorted is not merely the visible, but everything within the artist that shifts, transforms, and is shaken. Sometimes light seeps through a crack, sometimes that crack deepens. Ayşen’s paintings are an endeavour to make visible the fragility of both her world and her soul.