Secil Erel, awareness, 2025

Seçil Erel is a London-based, Turkish-British artist with studios in London and Istanbul. 
Her aim as an artist, is to create powerful abstract works of art, to connect reality and beyond reality, in addition to directing her audience to dream, feel and think, and to activate their inner creativity.

She graduated from the painting department at the Mimar Sinan Fine Art University with an undergraduate and Masters degrees. Over two decades, she has been exhibiting in solo and group exhibitions as well as art fairs, starting in Turkiye and expanding into Europe, United States and most recently in the United Kingdom. Throughout her career she has lectured in universities, took part in specialist conferences and symposia and participated at artist residencies. To date, Seçil published an artist book with publisher Istanbul Graphic Museum of Arts and exhibition monographs on the occasion of her solo shows at Gallery Zilberman and Gallery Milli Reasurans, Adas all in Istanbul.

Upon locating to London in 2017, she started to build a new set of associations, collaborations while familiarising herself with the UK art scene, while continuing to honour her existing bonds with Istanbul and the art scene in Turkey. Receiving a London Creative Network scholarship enabled her to further her studies in artist business development. Receiving the shortlist for the 253rd Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, 2021 brought her a vote of confidence in furthering her work in the UK.

On her practice

Her objective as an artist is to reach the pure source beyond time and space, free from all identities and to bring her paintings to life by adding a unifying spirit to life.

She is using her senses, feelings and observations and merging with concepts to paint to emotions on my canvases.

She sees herself as a dreamer who gets excited by the unknown future. For her, the idea of the future represents newness in ideas, conversations where she anchors herself with a new breath of air and sense of presence. She believes that awareness of one's own creativity and potential are guiding principles for a better and happier future for us individually and together as a whole.

Each one of her pieces represents a set of emotions, an array of ideas which denote physical, mental and energetic fields of resonance. With each work she calls upon the fact that another way of thinking and seeing the world is possible. The series of paintings comes with a story that relays conceptions of life and its manifestations on my concerns of care: human rights, diversity, sustainability, boundaries, and borders.

Her earlier works signify the strong connection and inspiration she had with geometry as a form of thinking and relaying composition.The layered and multi-coloured paintings emerged as geometrical compositions in the 2000’s. She believes, that by employing a grid as a format and building a painting through lines of colour helps to bridge concepts of unity and space.

Her personal experience had a tremendous impact on her practice, leading her to focus on her sense of self, her spirituality and her connection with nature. She started to focus beyond the physically visible, tapping into her consciousness and spiritual awareness.