LISTE Basel 2026 marks OG Gallery’s first participation at the fair with a solo presentation of new paintings by Yaz Taşçı. Born in Istanbul in 1997 and now living and working in Paris, Taşçı belongs to a generation of painters reexamining figuration through emotional and psychological intensity rather than narrative structure. Her practice centers on femininity, intimacy, desire, and collective female presence — subjects that carry particular urgency within the increasingly conservative social climate of contemporary Turkey. Without approaching painting didactically, Taşçı articulates a distinctly fearless and emotionally open visual language, one in which vulnerability, sensuality, and feminine subjectivity are asserted with unusual directness and autonomy.

The presentation brings together a recent body of figurative works centered on intimacy, feminine subjectivity, and emotional atmosphere. Across the presentation, Taşçı constructs nocturnal interiors and ambiguous landscapes inhabited by groups of women suspended between performance and introspection. Her figures appear in moments of embrace, confrontation, seduction, and withdrawal, often meeting the viewer’s gaze with expressions that oscillate between tenderness, melancholy, confidence, and unease. Refusing fixed narrative resolution, the paintings unfold instead through emotional proximity, gesture, and atmosphere.

Working with fluid brushwork, exaggerated physiognomies, and luminous tonal contrasts, Taşçı develops a visual vocabulary that merges stylization with emotional directness. Darkened backgrounds, flushed skin tones, theatrical makeup, and elongated gestures heighten the psychological intensity of the compositions while allowing the figures to emerge as both highly contemporary presences and archetypal forms. Her paintings channel the immediacy of diary-like figuration while drawing from broader histories of symbolic and mythological painting.

Recurring motifs including swans, flowers, mirrors, and twilight landscapes function as emotional and symbolic extensions of the figures themselves. Particularly within the swan paintings, Taşçı establishes a fluid correspondence between femininity, vulnerability, ritual, and transformation. These elements operate less as narrative devices than as atmospheric structures through which emotional states become materially visible.

While deeply personal in sensibility, Taşçı’s work reflects a broader generational condition shaped by emotional exposure, shifting identities, and the negotiation of intimacy within contemporary image culture. Her figures exist within carefully constructed psychological spaces where softness and theatricality coexist with tension, alienation, and desire.

The presentation foregrounds a significant development in Taşçı’s practice, both formally and conceptually. Expanding the emotional and compositional complexity of her paintings, the works presented at LISTE articulate a distinct approach to contemporary figuration grounded in intuition, psychological nuance, and painterly immediacy.