Ebru Varol

PRESS RELEASE

Ebru Varol: Reveries

February 29 to March 12, 2016

Gregg Gallery, The National Arts Club

Gallery Hours: Monday to Saturday 10am-5pm

In Reveries artist Ebru Varol presents a new body of photographic work. The title of the
show refers to the photographer’s creative process during her wanderings through urban
streets and nature’s paths. Varol’s imagery shifts aesthetically from black and white to
color and conceptually from the candid to the meditative.

Varol shoots in the tradition of street photographers like Eugène Atget and André
Kertész, reproducing views of ordinary objects. Her interest is not in the life on the
streets but life of the streets: the unconsidered details and her chance encounter with
forms. The protagonists are mannequins and figurines, chairs and windows, staircases,
locks, sculptural elements and the light disclosing all these forms. Composed in a
theatrical manner, these shapes interact and activate desolate scenes. Glass reflections
and mirrors reinforce the illusion of life in her photographs, while at the same time the
images remain unconscious of her presence.

Varol’s meditative landscapes, both urban and of nature, show a belief in the
significance of the senses: the transparent mistiness in the atmosphere, the texture of a
cloudy sky, the smell of the sea. Although static, frozen moments in time, the landscapes
feel animated: the clouds are moving, the city is waiting, the waves are calling. The
viewer becomes part of that particular moment and place in which the image was taken.
She/he experiences an intuitive perception of the meaning of these photographs, parallel
to the instinct that caused them to be created: a pure expression of an inner state of
being.

Ebru Varol has spent most of her life in three cities, on three different continents:
Istanbul, London and New York. These locations constantly inform her work and blend
into one imaginative place. Her photographs have been part of shows in Paris, London,
New York and Basel. This is the first solo presentation of the artist’s work in New York
City.