Ebru Duruman

Ebru Duruman was born in Istanbul in 1992 and lives and works in Johannesburg. She paints in oil on canvas, often at large scale, building her figures from fluid lines, vivid colour and forceful brushwork. Her pictures sit between abstraction and figuration, with the human body at their centre.

Duruman studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, completing a BFA and a BArch in 2015, and studied further at The Art Students League of NY in 2019. Her paintings treat sexuality as a link between body and mind. In Fluid Desire, her 2023 solo show at Dirimart Pera, paintings made in her Geneva studio set bodies in interior spaces and drew on the idea of home. Silent Presence (2026) shifts to the relation between body and nature, with figures fused to trees, water and stone in works such as Becoming Wild and What Remains.

Her solo exhibitions include Breasts and Breaths at Bloom Galerie, Geneva (2022), and Fluid Desire (2023) and Silent Presence (2026), both at Dirimart Pera, Istanbul. Group exhibitions include Fever Dreams with Victoria Miro on the online platform Vortic (2022) and Abstraction at Taymour Grahne Projects, London (2023). Later group shows include New Lands at Arkas Sanat, İzmir (2024) and Fragments of Reality at VIN VIN, Vienna (2025).