BIOGRAPHY

Alina Aygen is a Turkish painter based in Istanbul. She received her undergraduate education in Painting at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University and completed her graduate studies in Fine Arts. Working across painting, drawing, and material-based research, her practice investigates the relationship between the body, materiality, and architectural structure.

 

Approaching the body not as a psychological subject but as a physical system, Aygen explores how forces such as gravity, pressure, erosion, and time act upon living matter. Rather than focusing on identity or narrative, her work examines the body as a site of accumulation, resistance, transformation, and material change.

 

Drawing from architectural thinking and geological processes, she treats painting as an act of construction rather than representation. Layers of pigment are built, excavated, fractured, and reworked, transforming the painted surface into a material terrain where structure, weight, fragility, and decay become visible. In this context, paint functions not only as an image-making medium but also as a physical substance carrying its own history, tension, and material presence.

 

Her recent works investigate the unstable boundaries between flesh, architecture, landscape, and ruin. Through processes of sedimentation, compression, fragmentation, and collapse, she explores how bodies persist under pressure and how forms gradually shift from living structures into material remains.

 

Grounded in research yet rooted in the physical language of painting, Aygen’s practice seeks to reveal the structural conditions that shape bodily existence. Her work considers the body as both material and structure—something constructed, burdened, altered, and continuously transformed by the forces acting upon it.

 

She lives and works in Istanbul.