"St. Sophia in dreams" Painting

Aslıhan Kaplan Bayrak is an Istanbul-based painter and printmaker whose practice brings together the structural logic of engineering and the conceptual depth of philosophy within an intuitive, materially driven artistic process. She received her BFA in Painting from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University and later earned a BA in Philosophy from Anadolu University. Rather than defining her work through these disciplines, she transforms their influence into a visual language rooted in perception, intuition, and lived experience.

Her work begins not with fixed concepts but with moments of attention—a sensation, a landscape, a passage from a book, or an unexpected encounter—that gradually unfold into visual form. Instead of illustrating ideas, she allows the materials themselves to lead the process, embracing uncertainty, slowness, and discovery. Each work becomes a record of perception, where intuition and making evolve together, and meaning emerges through the act of creation rather than preceding it.

Working across oil painting, watercolor, drawing, mixed media, printmaking, video, and installation, Bayrak explores the subtle relationships between human experience and the more-than-human world. Through layered surfaces, translucent forms, organic structures, and gestural marks, she investigates the rhythms of nature, the silent memory of places, and the invisible connections that bind living beings across time and space. Her works invite viewers not simply to look, but to slow down, to sense, and to enter a contemplative dialogue with the environments they inhabit.

While her practice resonates with phenomenology, process philosophy, and posthuman thought, these ideas arise through embodied experience rather than serving as predetermined frameworks. The conceptual dimensions of her work emerge from the process itself—from sustained attention to materials, movement, memory, and the transformative potential of making. Balancing analytical thinking with intuitive exploration, Bayrak creates visual spaces where thought and feeling, order and spontaneity, coexist in quiet tension.

Her work has been exhibited extensively in Istanbul and internationally, with her prints included in exhibitions throughout Europe, the Americas, and Oceania. She continues to develop an interdisciplinary practice that expands the expressive possibilities of painting and printmaking while exploring new dialogues between body, landscape, memory, and ecological imagination.