Cenan ÖZTÜRKLER

Cenan Öztürkler (b. 1994, Kırıkkale) is a contemporary Turkish artist working with painting, photography and video art. He holds Bachelor of Fine Arts (2016), Master of Fine Arts (2019) and Doctor of Fine Arts (2025) degrees from the Painting Department of Hacettepe University.

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The concept of "threshold" lies at the heart of Cenan Öztürkler's artistic practice. His works are built upon a poetic language that aims to make visible the transient, fragile, and perpetually transforming nature of human existence. In this context, the concept of "threshold" denotes the space, time, event, emotion, and condition situated between two things. The threshold — forming the intersection of endings and new beginnings — is the point at which physical and psychological ruptures occur. It therefore emerges not merely as a spatial transition, but as the counterpart of the profound transformations an individual undergoes in the processes of identity, belonging, memory, and psychological experience.

In his production processes, the artist employs painting, photography, and video techniques as integral components of his conceptual expression. The balance he establishes between reality and dream forms the fundamental character of his practice. While drawing upon the familiar surface of reality, he aims to render visible the psychological layers concealed beneath that surface.

In the artist's visual universe, spaces transcend their plain reality to acquire a psychological and symbolic dimension. Figures, meanwhile, are always captured at a moment of rupture or transition. This state of in-betweenness places the figure within a permanent ambiguity. The body language of the figures gives concrete form to this ambiguity; a step has been taken but not completed, a gaze is directed somewhere, yet where it will arrive remains uncertain, there is movement, but no destination — or the destination is not visible. For this reason, the visual discourse constructed through the body language of the figures, their relationship with space, and the use of silence and light invites the viewer not so much toward a particular narrative, but rather to dwell within — and reflect upon — a sense of ambiguity and in-betweenness.