ZuZi

BIOGRAPHY

Raised in Istanbul, a city suspended between Europe and Asia, ZuZi studied Sociology before pursuing classical training in the visual arts. Her early practice in street photography, informed by Saul Leiter and Henri Cartier-Bresson, cultivated a sustained attention to gesture, posture, and the unguarded moment. The transition to painting marked a shift from external observation to internal excavation, from documenting surfaces to building images that evolve instinctively on the canvas.

TECHNIQUE

ZuZi's portraits are organized around what she terms Bilocated Presence: the condition of existing simultaneously in physical space and within the disembodied architecture of the digital sphere. In her figures, one eye engages the physical world while the other drifts toward a digital elsewhere. The gaze is never settled. Where traditional portraiture assumes a stable, singular subject, ZuZi's figures register a consciousness divided.

Working in mixed media on linen canvas at a predominantly large-scale, ZuZi builds her compositions through graphic, expressively rendered figuration and materially rich surfaces. She draws openly on the rawness of Dubuffet, the directness of Guston, and the emotional urgency of Van Gogh. Humor is a deliberate formal element, functioning as a rupture in the bilocated state, a demand for the viewer's full attention. The titles, the expressions, the scale all insist on presence.