Contemporary abstract visual art has been undergoing several fascinatingly transformative changes in recent years. It’s as if this important stratum of contemporary expression is no longer content with what it aims to be: the result of a pure gesture, the result of a performative expressive process, a departure from the forms of the surrounding world, an exercise in surface composition, and so on. Contemporary abstraction seems to want to pull off the paradoxical trick of self-reinvention: to remain something hermetic for interpretation while at the same time democratising and rationalising its origins. In this sense, abstraction as an artistic practice has a fairly open entry point for new artists, but at the same time an extraordinarily unpredictable further trajectory of personal careers, where there seems to be more randomness than regularity. Nevertheless, the most interesting contemporary abstract artists are primarily the creators of new philosophies for this type of visual culture production.

Ayşegül Demir Tatar, an artist from Turkey who exhibits regularly in her country and many parts of the world, is a stunning example of a bold and vibrant inventor of her own philosophy of abstraction. Her works can be described as large-format, muted, static, and dynamic at the same time. Her abstraction is a debunking of the concept of parallel universes. According to this concept, every time we make a choice, we create a parallel universe where we have acted differently. Ayşegül Demir Tatar’s works are a celebration of dual choice, an embodiment of the multiplicity of universes existing on a single plane.

However, the artist does not act through images, combinations of geometric shapes, or colour dramaturgy. First and foremost, Ayşegül Demir Tatar is an artist of micro-actions in relation to reality as a fabric, paper, or another not very dense medium. Her parallel coexisting universes are conveyed through such micro-actions as cuts, tears, crumples, touches, ruptures, pressures, and rubbings. This is very tactile, improvisational, and dynamic art, hidden behind the form of something static and constructed with cold reason. But even the presence of these fundamental microactions can be perceived through the quasi-impressionistic prism of artistic means employed by the artist: the color dynamics and the texture here act as a coded score of the microactions.

The most illustrative embodiment of this remarkable method is the series of works "The City and the Mountain." The title, as is customary with Ayşegül Demir Tatar, is highly deceptive. At first glance, the series seems to be a poetic reinterpretation of contours (contours characteristic of the city, the mountain, the city map, the geological landscape), but a closer look reveals in this work a direct (though encoded) existence of the infinite realities of a certain city-mountain by default, and the micro-actions here become the frustration of the inhabitants, the practices of daily routines, the wear and tear of public transport tickets, and paper money. And here the lyrical element turns out to be false; it passes in front of it (with close scrutiny) the polyphony of micro-actions and forks of fate, of which the object of artistic research consists. This produces a stunning aesthetic effect!

I heartily recommend that you engage with the art of Ayşegül Demir Tatar. Her works are a magical combination of outstanding professionalism and incredibly developed philosophy, which together evoke feelings akin to theatrical catharsis, simultaneously knocking the ground out from under the viewer and bestowing a sense of deserved grounding mixed with a sense of non-sectarian detachment.

Jenya Stashkov, Sheffield-based art critic, and artist