Yaprak Akıncı directs her gaze towards fuels that lay under the rocks and soil for millions of years, formed by heat and pressure factors, in her recent works on landscapes, where there are traces of humankind but none of the human body. She depicts a scene of loss or, as she puts it, "what re-mains after the human's effort to reach the fuel and drain the soil".

In her paintings, composed with the help of abstract stains, Akıncı exercises both revelation and obstruction techniques as a part of her output. Through her visual language, the concepts such as ephemerality, uncanny, change and destruction she has been frequently revisiting reveal her artistic acts, in a way that echoes the snow. Now it is the viewer who wanders alone in the landscapes of the artist and eventually gets lost. 

Even though soil and surface are closely related to the past in Akıncı's visual world, what matters is the present and the future.

The silent collaboration between these two time frames allows us to comprehend what is going on in the artist's world. In this endless journey that Akıncı creates through shapes and colours, she instrumentalizes the uncertainty of the future as a method. The fact that a point in the future can never be fully understood in the present signals a world filled with potential. Minus is at the intersection of all possibilities, in the middle of existence and non-existence.

 Yaprak Akıncı

She was born in Istanbul in 1984.

A graduate of Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Akıncı has produced work in sectors as varied as graphic design, photography, cinema and engraving, all of which continue to inform and enrich her compositions. In 2010, she moved to Rome to study for a Masters in Graphic Arts, where painting became the focus of her artistic output. Her first personal exhibition was held in the city in 2014. She has exhibited in many group exhibitions and has won a number of prizes in Italy and in the UK. Since 2015, she has lived in London and Istanbul, travelling and working between the two cities.