The extensive fi gurative work of Turkish artist Necla Rüzgar

(*1972), in her home country one of the best-known

contemporary painters of her generation, is on show at

GRIMMWELT Kassel for her fi rst solo exhibition in Germany.

The accompanying publication comprises a cross-section of

highly expressive works consisting of paintings and drawings

in which Rüzgar turns time and again to myths and legends

to address the cultural and social conditions of being a woman

in a misogynistic environment.

Symbolically charged and meticulously executed scenes

feature subtly unsettling constellations of women, men, and

animals, seemingly enraptured in sleep or ready to resort to

violence as the perpetrators and victims of a hunt involving

animals and humans. Rüzgar also revisits the ambiguous proximity

of women and animals in her concentrated ink drawings

created most recently during the Corona pandemic. Here

they undergo a liberating transformation as elegant hybrid

creatures from which ambivalent beings in metamorphosis

emerge: a womans head giving birth to a fox; the fox, to a

peacock. The publication available in German, Turkish, and

English is complemented by three introductory essays on the

artists work, written by the curator Kevser Güler, the historian

Christina Soose, and the art historian Peter Stohler.