Yiğit Özen

Biography

Yiğit Özen is a painter, born in 1994 in Istanbul. He works in acrylic, mostly on canvas. The paintings documented here date from 2019 onward and were made in Istanbul, Milan and Luxembourg.

Chronology

Özen moved to Milan in 2018, after two years of working mainly through photography, and began painting there. He kept a continuous studio practice until the pandemic, which found him in Istanbul with the studio and the paintings in Milan. In those years the work moved into digital production, and with his architectural training that became decentralize design. Painting continued intermittently; in 2026 he returned to it as a sustained practice.

The paintings

In the paintings a body appears as rounded units settle on top of one another. The contour arrives late and often does not arrive. Scale gives the verdict. A shape held large enough becomes somebody, and the same shape beside it becomes a row. Most of the ground stays unpainted, and that emptiness decides how far the figure gets to build.

Working parts

The same parts have been turning up since the beginning. A figure present in the scene and not looking. A chair nobody sits in. A frame drawn over the scene and left open. A bird that arrives under its own power, carrying something never unwrapped. These are working parts. Nothing in them waits to be solved. The one helping and the one crushing are made of the same heap.

Titles

Titles do not name the picture. A greeting, a game, a file name, a line taken from elsewhere. They set a second language beside the image and tilt it. Decisions are taken in wet paint, colour is held as a distribution. Over the years the parts stay where they are and the temperature changes.