About
Between presence and disappearance, her work explores the quiet language of memory.
About Talin Gülen Schenk
Talin Gulen Schenk is a visual artist whose work explores memory, silence, and the layered traces of time. Working with oil, acrylic, mixed media, and handmade recycled papers, she approaches the surface not simply as a place of image-making, but as a field where presence and disappearance, remembering and forgetting, remain in constant dialogue.
Her artistic practice developed through a deeply intentional path, shaped by lived experience, formal study, and a sustained interest in the ways memory is carried through material, gesture, and surface. Rather than beginning from a fixed image or narrative, her works often emerge through layers of paint, traces of movement, scraped passages, delicate marks, and restrained fields of color.
Born in Istanbul, the artist studied Visual Arts and Painting at Işık University, Faculty of Fine Arts, where she worked in the studio of Prof. Dr. Halil Akdeniz. She later completed her master’s degree in Art Theory and Criticism at Işık University. Her education also includes studies at Kunsthochschule Kassel in Germany with Prof. Johannes Spehr, and at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts, where she focused on printmaking with Ekaterina Shapiro-Obermair.
Across her paintings and works on paper, the artist explores how personal and collective memory can be held, obscured, fragmented, and reconfigured through material processes. In her handmade paper works, recycled newspaper is transformed into fragile, fibrous surfaces where printed words dissolve but do not fully disappear. These remnants become part of the material body of the work, carrying traces of time, language, and lived experience.
Her visual language often moves between deep blues, whites, greys, earth tones, and subtle metallic elements. Horizon lines, suspended forms, fragmented grids, and layered brushstrokes suggest spaces that are both internal and external; quiet places where silence accumulates and memory continues to shift.
Coming to art through a later and deeply committed path has become an essential part of the artist’s practice. Her work is shaped not by immediacy, but by accumulation: of experience, observation, silence, and time. This sense of layered becoming is central to her paintings, where each surface becomes a space of reflection, transformation, and return.
Talin Gülen Schenk lives and works between Istanbul and Berlin.
