Jan 8, 2026 - Jan 24, 2026

the women issues

Feza Güvenal

Feza Güvenal’s exhibition "the women issues" approaches the experience of womanhood not as a singular narrative, but as a multilayered inner journey. Through an abstract visual language, the artist renders visible the tensions accumulated on women’s bodies, memories, and emotional states under the pressures, expectations, and invisible burdens of contemporary life.

Güvenal’s paintings focus on contradictions that are often blurred or normalized in everyday life: strength and fragility, resilience and exhaustion, the desire to be visible and the need to withdraw. These oppositions materialize on the canvas through the coexistence of calm areas and dense, dark surfaces. Color moves beyond a purely aesthetic function, becoming a carrier of emotional weight, suppressed memory, and energies of resistance.

The artist’s expressionist language points to the constant state of “balancing” imposed on women within social roles. Rather than seeking absolute serenity in the midst of chaos, Güvenal explores the possibilities of existing alongside it. The paintings do not offer an escape, but instead create temporary spaces for breathing—sites where women can reconnect with themselves and recall their inner strength.

The Women Issues primarily unfolds through abstract and emotional layers without confining women’s issues to a direct figurative representation, while still allowing space for figurative readings. In the limited number of figurative works included in the selection, a collective female experience becomes visible through the shifting traces of time, memory, and emotion on the canvas. Each layer points to the transience and transformability of lived experiences: neither pain nor resistance is fixed; each remains open to reconfiguration.

In Güvenal’s practice, hope does not emerge from an idealized vision of the future, but from an acceptance of impermanence. The exhibition offers a quiet yet resolute visual narrative of women’s continuously restarting, reconstructing, and strengthening existences, inviting viewers to confront their own inner tensions and to reconsider their individual “breathing spaces.”