SANATORIUM is pleased to present Çağla Köseoğulları’s first solo exhibition in the United States titled “Seeping Into the Horizon” at Fierman, New York from April 2 to May 8. The exhibition brings together works on paper, continuing the artist’s exploration of bodily memory, gesture, and the fragile relationship between image and surface.
Köseoğulları’s practice spans drawing, painting, video, and ceramics, developing from her ongoing research around drawing as both a material and performative process. Working primarily with ink, charcoal, and charcoal powder, the artist produces images that remain porous, atmospheric, and open to transformation. Her works often emerge through intuitive gestures that record subtle traces of bodily movement, turning surfaces into spaces where memory, perception, and material presence intersect.
Works made with blue ink spread across the paper through stains, dispersions, and layered movements, establishing a surface that explores the thresholds where forms emerge and dissolve. Color functions less as a means of depiction than as a condition, an environment in which images slowly appear and fade; the horizon emerges here like an object of desire that continually recedes and can never be fully grasped.
Alongside these works, an installation of black-and-white works showcases the artist’s exploration of landscape. Inspired by the experience of observing scenery from a moving train, Köseoğulları engages her eyes, hands, and instincts almost like a camera, capturing the fleeting impressions of rapidly passing views. The works reflect the traces and marks that landscapes imprint on the mind as they disappear from view, revealing a perception of time that slips away within the rhythm of everyday routines.
Rather than narrating a train journey directly, the works focus on the act of seeing itself. Observation and movement form the central axis of the work: the eye follows the landscape while the landscape simultaneously moves past the eye. What remains is not the scene itself but its residue, a stain of what has been seen, a trace of what has been remembered.
Rivers, hills, plains, and tunnels dissolve into gestures and marks that hover between abstraction and landscape. As the memory of the scene fades, its imprint persists, transforming into form. These images operate like small pockets of recollection in which passing experiences accumulate and settle.
Across the works presented in “Seeping Into the Horizon”, Köseoğulları approaches drawing as a temporal act, one that records moments of contact between the body, memory, and the world. Marks emerge slowly, disperse, and accumulate, forming quiet images that hover between appearance and disappearance.
About the artist:
Çağla Köseoğulları’s practice is based on painting, video and ceramic works that develop from her research around drawing. In her works, the artist focuses on social and psychological landscapes, the natural environment and its animate and inanimate parts by establishing relationships with the concepts of space and memory. In her recent works, Köseoğulları concentrates on charcoal and charcoal powder on paper, ink works on PVC and ceramic sculptures. In these works, she examines ways and possibilities of expression for the bodily memory. With her volatile and fragile works that are open to environmental influence, Köseoğulları raises questions about the relationship between image, material and surface, and invites us to consider the distance between the presence of the image and the concepts of gesture and trace.
