Fleurs Sombres

OG Gallery is pleased to present Fleurs Sombres, Yaz Taşçı’s second solo exhibition, on view from May 29 to July 5, 2025.

Fleurs Sombres, Taşçı’s first solo exhibition in Turkey, brings together a series of paintings produced during her year-long residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris. Drawing from her own emotional states, the artist constructs imaginary scenes that explore themes of desire, emotional intimacy, and companionship.

At the heart of Fleurs Sombres are female figures who are neither entirely familiar nor completely unknown to one another. Sometimes gathering in nature, other times around a picnic cloth, these figures appear as bodies that carry, embrace, and touch each other. In scenes enveloped by night, the unease of moving through darkness intertwines with the security of being together. Taşçı constructs narratives shaped around dualities such as familiarity and estrangement, safety and anxiety, curiosity and distance. In the gazes of these figures sometimes directed at each other, sometimes capturing the viewer’s eye one senses an inner depth and a fragile state of being that drifts between different emotional tones.

In her paintings, Taşçı positions the dark flowers not merely as decorative elements but as a protective perimeter surrounding the figures. These dense vegetal forms simultaneously evoke a confined space and a texture bearing the gloom of our contemporary moment. Through this, the artist renders visible the emotions of unease, vulnerability, and resilience that reside within us, using natural imagery as her means. The flowers emerge as reflections of shared emotions we nurture collectively, pointing to a search for belonging and a repository of collective memory. The layered textures accumulating on the surface transform into a kind of memory, bearing the traces of time and lived experience. 

Exhibition text by Yasemin Köker

Selected Works