Merve T. Ekinci
Inspiring Your Surroundings
Explore a collection of original oil paintings on canvas, each reflecting a dialogue between color, form, and emotion. This portfolio presents works that invite contemplation and transform the spaces they inhabit.
Portfolio
My practice moves between abstraction and symbolism, exploring identity, belonging, protection, and the unseen forces that shape us. I work with oil, layered surfaces, erasure, and line to create tension between structure and emotion. Each piece begins as an experiment in material, but evolves into a reflection on internal and collective experience.
Much of my work responds to lived reality — political unrest, war, social pressure, displacement — but rather than illustrating events directly, I translate them into visual metaphors. A black square becomes a site of disturbance. A heart becomes an act of resistance. A boat, a house, a tree, a horizon — each becomes a question about where and how we belong.
I am drawn to metaphysical creation: the idea that something unseen is always forming beneath the surface. Through layering, scraping, building, and revealing, I allow that hidden presence to emerge. My work is not about fixed answers. It is about tension — between silence and voice, shelter and exposure, root and horizon.
Ultimately, I see painting as both excavation and construction: a space where personal memory, collective experience, and symbolic language meet.
Artist Statement
My practice moves between abstraction and symbolism, exploring identity, belonging, protection, and the unseen forces that shape human experience. I am interested in what exists beneath the surface — the emotional, psychological, and metaphysical layers that cannot be captured through literal representation.
Working primarily with oil, I build my paintings through layering, erasure, and reconstruction. The surface becomes a site of tension: structure against gesture, silence against eruption, control against vulnerability. Through this process, something hidden begins to emerge.
Much of my work is informed by lived reality — political unrest, war, social pressure, displacement — yet I do not aim to document events directly. Instead, I translate them into visual metaphors: a disrupted square, a heart as resistance, a boat adrift, a house that never fully belongs, a horizon that remains just out of reach.
I am drawn to metaphysical creation — the belief that something unseen is always forming beneath what we perceive. My paintings are acts of excavation and construction at once. They ask not for passive viewing, but for reflection. They invite the viewer to confront tension, to recognise fragility, and to consider what it means to search for belonging in an unstable world.
