Merve İşeri

Merve İşeri (b.1992) is a painter whose practice investigates the porous boundary between human and non-human modes of communication. Working across painting, sound, and movement, she develops a visual vocabulary in which mark, symbol, and pattern function less as fixed signs than as gestures in an ongoing dialogue between nature, body, and psyche.

İşeri treats the canvas as a site of emergence rather than depiction: lines converge and disperse, accumulate and dissolve, generating meaning even as they resist settling into it. This instability is generative — each painting proposes a provisional language, legible not through translation but through resonance. Sound and movement, often present as compositional principles within the work itself, extend this logic, treating rhythm and silence as further registers of the same inquiry.

Underlying the work is an ecological sensibility: an interest in interdependence, in the relations that exceed the human, and in forms of attention that might be called animist or relational rather than representational. The result is an invitation — for the viewer to locate, within the encounter between personal and communal, a momentary point of merging.

Merve İşeri graduated from Politecnico di Milano in Communication Design in 2014 and has been living between London and Istanbul since. Her work has been exhibited in various solo and group shows in London, New York, Istanbul, Milan, Chicago, Nottingham, Brighton, Sicily, Torino, Brussels, Miami and São Paulo. The artist has had two solo exhibitions with Ballon Rouge Collective in September 2017 in Istanbul and later in April 2019 in Brussels. Her work has been published in The Financial Times, Frieze Magazine, Huffington Post, Vice, Harper’s Bazaar Turkey, among others.