Deniz Bayav

Dérive, Oil on Canvas, Contemporary painting, Water Reflections, Leafs, Nature

2025

Deniz Bayav was born in 1980 in Merzifon, Turkey. She lives and works in France. After finishing her licence at the University of Marmara (Istanbul) in the Fine Arts Education/Painting Department, she pursued her Master and PhD studies in the same university while working more specifically on painting and printmaking. She is a professor at Trakya University Painting Department in Edirne. She has been teaching painting, printmaking and drawing at this university since 2006. During the 2018-2019 academic year she worked as a “visiting professor” at Paris 8 University Department of Visual Arts in France. She is working as a “visiting professor” at the Higher School of Art Dunkerque-Tourcoing in the 2023-2024 academic year. _____ I have been working on the notion of opposition both in my paintings and engravings. When we have a look at my different series from the past to the present, this opposition is sometimes achieved through obvious contrasts of the different values of the colors, sometimes with light-dark areas, sometimes by distinct texture contrasts or opposing concepts: Existence and nonexistence, birth and death, organic and inorganic, fresh and faded… Leaves, feathers, eggs, bitten apples and rotting fruits always carry marks that point to the beginning and the end. Thus, it establishes links with “vanitas” and “memento mori” in art history. In my daily life, in my nature walks, I always search for effects, objects and organisms that remind me of this opposition and cycle and I transfer some of them to my works. This cycle and “eternal return” are treated in Thus Spoke Zarathustra as follows: “Everything goes, everything comes back; the wheel of being rolls eternally. Everything dies, everything blossoms again, the year of being runs eternally.”