Near and far at the same time, familiar and yet strange. Burcu Bilgiç paints scenes that seem like blurred memories. Through abstract lines, Burcu creates “familiar landscapes that don’t exist,” she says. In doing so, she comes to terms with her past and associated feelings such as loneliness. “You can see the place that is behind the lines, but you can’t reach it. So you don’t become part of that world. That’s how I often felt in my life.”
Before Burcu came to Munich nine years ago, she grew up in Istanbul. She has been painting since she can remember. All it would have taken to calm her down as a child was pen and paper. “In kindergarten, a teacher told me that I could become a painter. I didn’t fully understand what that meant at the time. But I still felt that it was exactly what I wanted to be,” she says.
Her desire to make her art a career initially met with little acceptance. When she then applied with her paintings to a renowned art school in Istanbul and won first place as one of 600 applicants, that changed. Before Burcu found herself in abstract painting, she completed a classical and technically focused training.
If you look at Burcu’s pictures, you can feel that she seems to have found her style. Their characteristic abstract lines and grid structures sometimes reveal more or less that the patterns are landscapes. Burcu not only works purely painterly, but also implements her ideas using different materials. On glass or in walk-in room installations.
“At the beginning I was primarily concerned with the relationship between people and nature in urban areas. Now it’s about more than that,” says Burcu. The grids became symbolic; they are supposed to represent obstacles. Challenges that Burcu had to overcome in her life in order to fight for her self-determination as a woman in a patriarchal environment.
“When I paint, I feel whole,” says Burcu. When she is not working on her works at the art academy, she voluntarily gives art workshops for young people with a migrant background. Working with young women is important to her. “I want to give them what I’ve often been missing. A support on their way to fighting for a place in the world,” she says.