Young Aegean artist: You are great, now change

With short platinum hair, dark eyebrows and a velvet black dress that hugs her figure, Güne? Topalöz more resembles a 21st century version of a Hollywood femme fatale rather than a painter who draws tortured portraits. The 24-year-old artist, who has previously displayed her work in the prestigious Pera Museum in Istanbul, uses crosses in bright colors across the faces of her portraits as a replacement for her signature. "An artist's signature is just a detail, a show of ego," she said, with the determined expression you see in the young, while speaking to Hürriyet Daily News at the opening of the exhibition.

Topalöz's personal exposition titled "Güne?, I love you, You are Great. Now Change" on display at Gallery No2 the Aegean city of ?zmir consists of larger-than-life portraits with haunted eyes, distorted faces and bodies twisted in panic. The artist, serene, with a soft, modest voice, talked to friends, family and perfect strangers amid those portraits while occasionally sneaking out to have a cigarette during the exhibition. Her sketches, or "Diaries," are somewhat milder, with a touch of irony. "Mankind loves itself, even when it looks at its own ca-ca," says a scribble in one sketch. It shows a figure that has bent over to examine something on the soil. 

Another sketch shows a naked figure, stretched to allow a shadow to emerge from within, rather like Siamese twins. But of all the works, possibly the most haunting is the one in the main room: A woman's body in a double-twist at the corner, legs pulled to the chest and eyes, dark gray among the tones of red, that seem to move.

"My work is about the struggle in me, what is there and what is not there, what I do not see in me, what I cannot reach. Those emotions or identities that make...