Elif Gurbuz

I'm an independent artist based in London, working in abstract drawing, painting, collage, and visual poetry. My work translates the subconscious into bold, diagrammatic images through a generative process that quiets the critical mind and unlocks a creative flow. I make art automatically, welcoming serendipity, chaos and happy accidents.

My work balances simple, primitive forms and complexity by following predetermined algorithms, which outline instructions that I follow like a human-machine. By anthropomorphizing machine logic, I introduce ambiguity into formal decisions, while practising rituals that train my creative muscles like a computer. This builds new aesthetic pathways into my art. While the algorithms become poetic side pieces, they also become the context for the visual outcome. The rhetorics of the algorithms vary from abstract to precise and emotional to rational, generating restriction and freedom in varying degrees.

This ongoing research explores human-made generative art through the lens of error. The aim is to uncover the subconscious and intuition in visual form.

I am a conceptual design director and art director specialising in digital products. For the past 12 years, I’ve worked with top agencies and leadi...

Central Saint Martins, MA Communication Design, 2015
METU, BSc Architecture, 2011

London Design Festival 2018
OFFF Barcelona, 2018
London Design Festival, 2017