Sena Gökçeoğlu was born in 1994. She graduated from the Painting Department of Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in 2017. She completed her master's degree at the same university in 2020. Her master's thesis was titled "The Expressive Body Image in the Paintings of Nevhiz Tanyeli and Alaettin Aksoy." She also conducted research on Chaïm Soutine's frame studies.
She is currently pursuing a Proficiency in Art program at the Graduate Education Institute of Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University. Having participated in the BASE project in 2017, the artist has exhibited in approximately 25 group exhibitions in Turkey. She continues her work in her studio in Istanbul.
In this series, which appears to be body studies but where I consider the drawing not as a preparation but as the final result, I have taken Holbein's "Dead Christ" as my starting point. In contrast to traditional depictions of Jesus where we can see his resurrection as indicated in the Bible, Holbein's Jesus is portrayed with a sense of reality that reinforces our belief in his death, not his resurrection. Holbein's approach breaks with this traditional style and questions the reality of the story being told. This almost inverted religious narrative of reality led me to deconstruct the central issue of this painting. The fragmentation of the body in these drawings, and the fact that we repeatedly look at these fragments from different angles, seems like a modest attempt at an answer to these questions. The drawing becomes a tool that reduces dramatization, allowing this fragmentation to find a simple and sincere expression, just like Holbein's, because neither color nor material stands out to say anything extra. Within the understanding of deformation that I sometimes grasped accidentally and intuitively, the body is not in a painful state of fragmentation; the fragmentation functions, in a way, to allow us to look more closely at the body and perceive its reality through these images.
And can this body be free even without Jesus? (From the series “And can this body be free even without Jesus?”) 2018 Charcoal, ink and acrylic paint on paper 33 × 26 cm
