ELVAN ALPAY IS MEETING ART LOVERS AT SEVİL DOLMACI GALLERY WITH HER FIRST MAJOR EXHIBITION IN 10 YEARS!
Sevil Dolmacı Gallery is proud to present Pánta Rheî / Works 2021–2025, an exhibition featuring new works Elvan Alpay has produced over the last five years. The exhibition will be on view between 2 December 2025 to 3 January 2026.
Taking its title from the philosophical fragment by Heraclitus summed up in the phrase
“everything flows”, the exhibition approaches flow not only as a metaphor but as a mode of
behaviour inherent to the nature of matter itself.
In Alpay’s canvases, pigment, acrylic, glass dust and light go beyond being mere materials
and become part of a physical event. In this sense, painting is presented to the viewer not as
an object but as a “current”, as a state of becoming.
Today, Alpay’s works are held in institutions such as Fondation Cartier (Paris), Mitsubishi
Foundation (Tokyo) and OMM Odunpazarı Modern Museum (Eskişehir), as well as in
major collections including Koç, Sabancı, Eczacıbaşı, Akbank, Alarko, QNB Finansbank,
Yıldız Holding, Arçelik, Boyner, ENKA and TurkishBank. In this exhibition, the artist
revisits this existing institutional memory through the idea of “matter in motion”, shifting
painting away from a finished image towards the visual record of processes such as fracture,
evaporation, seepage and solidification.
Winner of the Grand Prize at the 2006 Beijing Biennale, Alpay has a multilayered exhibition
history extending from Paris to Tokyo, and from London to New York. Yet Pánta Rheî offers
the first cohesive selection in which the works she has produced since 2021 can be seen
together: the physics of dragonflies’ speed, the underground intelligence of fungi, the maps
traced by leaf veins and beams of light trapped in acrylic all shape the world of this
exhibition.
Alpay’s practice rejects the “representation of nature” and instead invites nature itself into the painting. In the artist’s own words: “I do not choose motifs. They act; I record.”
Pánta Rheî / Works 2021–2025 is not a thematic exhibition, but a field of experimentation.
The viewer does not encounter a fixed image, but bears witness to a continuous becoming.
Rather than merely looking at painting, this exhibition invites audiences to be carried away by its current.
