art
MARIA MAGDALENA - II
18 September - 7 October 2026
Throughout a career spanning more than fifty years, Nilgün Tüzüntürk has placed a broad visual world—ranging from nature and the human figure to animals, mythology, and mystical narratives—at the center of her painting practice. Reimagined through the artist’s imagination, these elements are translated onto canvas through a figurative expressionist approach. For Tüzüntürk, painting is not merely a field of artistic production, but a means of expression through which her relationship with life, emotions, experiences, and beliefs become visible.
The artist believes that painting cannot be separated from life. For her, art emerges through existing within life, living, and experiencing it. From painting and sculpture to theatre, cinema, poetry, opera, and music, different artistic disciplines carry the desire to move beyond individual expression, reach society, and make one’s voice heard. Art acquires its true meaning when it encounters its audience and becomes part of collective life.
The transformations in Tüzüntürk’s artistic practice can be traced through the subjects she has explored and the formal approaches she has pursued across different periods. Between 1984 and 1986, she produced figurative works centered on nature and the human figure. In the following years, she moved toward a Cubist visual language, creating compositions featuring matadors and bulls alongside socially engaged, human-centered works. Following the influence of Cubism, Tüzüntürk turned toward abstraction, while themes of faith, revelation, sin, and salvation began to take a more prominent place in her work during the 1990s.
In 1990–1991, inspired by the revelations in the Book of Revelation, the artist began translating these narratives into painting. She completed the series in 1993 and exhibited the works at Saint Antoine Church in Istanbul. This period, which began with the visions of John, gradually led to the figure of Mary Magdalene, who would come to occupy an important place in Tüzüntürk’s artistic practice.
In Tüzüntürk’s paintings, Mary Magdalene is approached through the transformation she undergoes following her encounter with Jesus Christ. The narrative of a sinful past followed by repentance and purification merges with the artist’s own world of faith and is reinterpreted through different compositions. Through the figure of Mary Magdalene, concepts such as sin, repentance, forgiveness, and salvation become visible, while the artist expands this religious narrative into a broader exploration of the relationship individuals establish with their own past and inner world.
Maria Magdalena II continues a narrative that Nilgün Tüzüntürk has explored for many years. In this exhibition, which constitutes the second series of her works centered on Mary Magdalene, the artist once again turns to the human figure—a recurring focus throughout her practice—through the concepts of faith, sin, purification, transformation, and salvation. In doing so, Mary Magdalene moves beyond her role as a figure within a religious narrative and becomes a symbol of confronting one’s own past, beliefs, and inner world.
