The extensive fi gurative work of Turkish artist Necla Rüzgar
(*1972), in her home country one of the best-known
contemporary painters of her generation, is on show at
GRIMMWELT Kassel for her fi rst solo exhibition in Germany.
The accompanying publication comprises a cross-section of
highly expressive works consisting of paintings and drawings
in which Rüzgar turns time and again to myths and legends
to address the cultural and social conditions of being a woman
in a misogynistic environment.
Symbolically charged and meticulously executed scenes
feature subtly unsettling constellations of women, men, and
animals, seemingly enraptured in sleep or ready to resort to
violence as the perpetrators and victims of a hunt involving
animals and humans. Rüzgar also revisits the ambiguous proximity
of women and animals in her concentrated ink drawings
created most recently during the Corona pandemic. Here
they undergo a liberating transformation as elegant hybrid
creatures from which ambivalent beings in metamorphosis
emerge: a woman's head giving birth to a fox; the fox, to a
peacock. The publication available in German, Turkish, and
English is complemented by three introductory essays on the
artist's work, written by the curator Kevser Güler, the historian
Christina Soose, and the art historian Peter Stohler.