Necla Rüzgar

Necla Rüzgar was born in 1972 in Tunceli, Turkey. She works in painting, drawing, watercolour, sculpture, photography and video, and her figures often join people and animals in a single body. She is a professor in the painting department of the Faculty of Fine Arts at Hacettepe University.

Her images pair violence with tenderness to describe ordinary life under social and political pressure. The installation Birds of God, made of dead birds painted by hand, was part of The Overcoming Silence at Galeri Nev in 2016. Later series centre on multi-hearted beings, first drawn in colour and then reduced to faint marks, shown alongside unpainted bronze sculptures.

Rüzgar received a doctorate in painting from Hacettepe University in 2004. Her first solo exhibition, Fauna, opened at Galeri Nev in Istanbul in 2014. In 2018 Deniz Artun curated a retrospective of her work at the Galata Greek School. From November 2021 to April 2022 the Grimmwelt museum in Kassel showed My Name Was Written On Every Page, a group of 100 works. Her work has also been seen at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, Bucharest's National Museum of Contemporary Art and Istanbul Modern.