Filiz Düzenli lives and works in Hamburg. For her, her art is an extension of her of her healing practice and reveals a deeply personal vision.
For seven years now, she has been creating “Wandelweise” – delicate and filigree portraits of exclusively female faces with closed eyes. Silent and looking inwards, they focus on their own creative power. Their work is an exploration of feelings of violation and healing of femininity.
In these intimate portraits, Düzenli captures the figure absorbed in herself. She uncovers hidden narratives and conjures up symbols of deep transformation and healing. She experiments with photographs and digital image collages. Intuitively layered watercolours and photographs give rise to the final works. The feminine plays a significant role in Filiz Düzenli’s art. In her works, she deals with her personal and collective experience of the suppression of female power and transforms it into a symbol of women’s dignity. A spiritual art, which in its healing and sacred dimension should be accessible to the future of humanity, which directs the mind to the beauty of female power and gives courage for a world that reconciles love and power.
A further condensation of her artistic work finds expression in embroidered “Wandelweisen”. During the first pandemic lockdown in 2020, confined to her home yet holding the threads of her life and work in her own hands, embroidery takes on unexpected meaning. The embroidered images are emblematic of femininity, as embroidery is an activity mainly practised by women across cultures. For Filiz Düzenli, embroidery, like painting, has a meditative, unifying, grounding and at the same time reconciliatory dimension. Looking back, she sees that with embroidery she found a means of inner reconciliation with her mother. Today she is grateful to her mother for her skill and creativity.
If the eyes closed in silence symbolise a general looking inwards with strength and wisdom anchored there, the emphasis on inwardness is taken to a new level in combination with embroidery. The centre of the embroidery on the third, the spiritual eye, aligns with a higher order.
If the embroidered “Wandelweisen” mark the centre of a figurative picture, the abstract embroideries are completely detached from the figurative. The central and unifying motif is the circle. Almost like mandalas, the creation and contemplation of which can be a deep, meditative process. They symbolise the path to “unity-consciousness”, as Düzenli describes it, and the state of mind at the moment of creation. What they all have in common is that, like the “Wandelweisen”, they are delicate, filigree and graceful, almost seeming vulnerable.
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FILIZ DÜZENLI /*1972 Germany