Each canvas by Turkish artist Tulay Cakir offers viewers an enigma in its mixture of digital printing and acrylic paints. These contrasting media create layers in her works, overlapping and pushing against each other, allowing us to take their respective forms and movements into account while observing the larger composition. Cakir highlights inherent contrast between her materials – one flat and matted, the other glossy and embossed – playing the two off each other with magnificent results. Her stylized and expressive mode moves between abstraction and figurative images, enriched by her background and work as a sculptor, to produce constantly intriguing results.

Certain works adhere to an aesthetic of rhythmic, geometric shapes and broiling, swooping acrylic forms. Elsewhere, Cakir creates narratives in which figurative characters compete. Like the materials from which they are crafted, her players seem embroiled in some primordial rivalry. Whether figurative or abstract, Tulay Cakir’s images gain in texture and complexity from being structured around evenly matched opposing characteristics: smooth and gritty, colorful and dark, strong and gentle, anthropomorphic and abstract. By heightening these conflicts, each piece offers new solutions.