Taking place at Sevil Dolmacı Gallery’s Dubai space in Dubai Design District (d3), Unfolded Layers marks a new chapter in Ahmet Oran’s ongoing exploration of abstraction, perception, and the quiet power of surface. Known for championing leading Turkish and international contemporary artists, Sevil Dolmacı Gallery provides a contemplative, light-filled setting where Oran’s works breathe with subtle intensity. The exhibition, which opened on October 27, brings together new paintings that turn silence, memory, and time into visual atmospheres rather than images to be consumed at a glance.
Living between Istanbul and Vienna, Ahmet Oran has developed an abstract language where emotional intensity and formal restraint meet in quietly charged surfaces. In Unfolded Layers, scraping, erasure, and muted color fields become tools for turning memory, time, and perception into a slow, unfolding experience rather than an image grasped at a glance.
1. Living between Istanbul and Vienna for many years has clearly shaped your artistic vision. How do these two distinct cultural environments manifest in your approach to abstraction, and does one city influence your process of layering while the other influences your erasure?
Living between Istanbul and Vienna for many years has given me two very different kinds of rhythm: Istanbul’s emotional intensity and Vienna’s intellectual clarity. These two cities meet in my abstraction process. Istanbul influences the layers – the intuitive buildup, the traces of movement and memory. Vienna, on the other hand, informs the act of reduction – the discipline of erasing, refining, and seeking essential form. My works are therefore a dialogue between these two energies: one impulsive and layered, the other deliberate and measured.
2. You studied under three prominent professors across different disciplines – Adnan Çoker in Istanbul, and Carl Unger and Adolf Frohner in Vienna. How did working in painting, stained glass, and graphic studios simultaneously shape your understanding of surface and transparency, concepts so central to “Unfolded Layers”?
My time with Adnan Çoker in Istanbul lasted about a year. It wasn’t a long period, but it was a meaningful one. Working near him gave me a clearer sense of direction; he pushed me to trust my own ability and to continue on a more professional path. Later, my years in Vienna with Carl Unger and Adolf Frohner were much more extended and formative. From them, I learned an approach to process, discipline, and artistic integrity. Moving between painting, stained glass, and graphic arts allowed me to understand the dialogue between surface and transparency. In Unfolded Layers, this understanding becomes central – each layer reflects both the precision I learned in Vienna and the expressive impulse that first took root in Istanbul.
3. Your work transforms absence into presence through the act of scraping and erasure. Can you describe a specific moment in your studio when removing paint revealed something unexpected – a memory, texture, or rhythm you hadn’t anticipated – and how that discovery changed the direction of that piece?
Yeah, it might happen sometimes—these kinds of moments occur naturally in the studio. I always begin with a clear goal and structure; everything is built on a kind of scientific and experiential foundation. But even within that clarity, there are moments when something unexpected appears – a light, a rhythm, or a trace that shifts the perception of the work. These aren’t coincidences but rather signs that the process is alive. Sometimes such moments even become the key that activates the original intention, giving new energy to
continue and complete the painting.
4. Collections like Istanbul Modern, Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, and the Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture have acquired your work. When you see your pieces in these institutional contexts, do you view them as finished artifacts or as continuing dialogues about memory and time that shift with each viewer’s engagement?
When I see my works in museum collections, I don’t see them as closed or frozen objects. Of course, every work is completed through the artist’s own decision – I finish each piece consciously before it leaves the studio. But once it is outside, it continues another kind of life. The perception of the viewer, the light, and even time itself start to reshape it in subtle ways. So while the work is finished in form, its meaning keeps evolving , becoming a continuous dialogue between memory, time, and the observer.
5. The “Unfolded Layers” series presents abstraction as “a language of introspection and existence.
” In our current moment of digital immediacy and surface-level interactions, what do you hope viewers discover when they slow down to contemplate the accumulated gestures and hidden rhythms within your muted color fields?
Everything today is overloaded with meaning; artists are often expected to explain too much. I believe that if the viewer slows down and simply gives time to look, a dialogue can begin between the work and the observer. The painting speaks only when we allow silence and time to exist.