art
Betül Dura
Betül Dura was born in Ankara in 1995, where she completed her primary, secondary, and high school education. She began painting in 2014 and, seeking to pursue it academically, successfully entered the Painting Department through the university entrance examinations. Throughout her education, she developed her practice across various disciplines of the visual arts.
In 2018, she received an award at the Erzurum Painting and Sculpture Competition with her work Gaze, and in 2019, she was awarded at the 18th Şefik Bursalı Painting Competition for her work Turning Inward. In the same year, she made her first institutional donation to the collection of the Atatürk University Faculty of Fine Arts Museum.
Between 2015 and 2019, Dura completed her undergraduate studies in the Department of Painting at Hacettepe University Faculty of Fine Arts, graduating at the top of her class. She received her Master's degree from Hacettepe University in 2022, where her thesis focused on the concept of the "Grotesque Body," a subject that continues to inform her artistic practice.
Since 2020, Betül Dura has been exhibiting her work through Gala Gallery. Having participated in numerous group exhibitions and art fairs, she presented her first solo exhibition under the title "The Journey of Seeking Through Transforming Bodies." The emotional fluctuations and psychological states experienced by the artist are reflected throughout her paintings.
Dura continues her personal artistic practice while also teaching art at the painting studio she founded.
Manifesto
Betül Dura's artistic practice focuses on the human search for liberation from imposed identities, social conventions, and learned perceptions of the body. In this existential act of resistance, the artist reconstructs the female form through a grotesque metamorphosis, moving beyond conventional aesthetics and idealized standards of beauty.
In her investigation of the body, figures merge with symbolic elements such as horns, peacocks, and fish, as well as animal limbs, transforming into hybrid and surreal forms. Through a process of deformation, these weary bodies fragment, multiply, and lose their familiar boundaries, presenting the viewer with an internal conflict. This transformation of the body is not merely a formal distortion, but a manifestation of the struggle to reach one's own truth by passing through the circle of fear, anxiety, and the uncanny.
Within this surreal universe, constructed through the dramatic power of color and the atmosphere created by formal composition, Betül Dura reveals the repressed, dark, and mysterious layers of human nature. The artist invites the viewer to witness the transformative journey of fragmented bodies and, within an experience that is both unsettling and captivating, to question their own inner truth.
