Hülya Özdemir sketches women not as muses, but as protagonists—brave, intricate, colour-saturated, and full of story. Born in Istanbul and now painting by the Turkish Aegean Sea, she layers watercolour and pattern to reveal the inner lives of her subjects: a ripple of confidence fluttering beneath the swirl of decorative motifs.
Her portraits always feel intimately familiar, yet something about them is just off-axis: a gaze that doesn’t invite, but demands. Bold backgrounds meet subtle expression. Patterns that wrap and transform a figure, yet don’t swallow it. She uses colour like a whisper and a shout at the same moment: lemon-bright yellows, deep teal shadows, flickers of gold. Each piece feels like a thought pulled from memory, stretched out into line, then hung on the wall.
Özdemir grew up painting, but the real shift came when she realised her women were more than pretty faces—each was a story, a claim, an identity in motion. She trained herself by immersion: drawing, exploring decorative arts, living in places where tradition and modernity collide. She names artists like Frida Kahlo and Gustav Klimt among her influences, yet her voice is unmistakably her own: clean, graphic, emotionally layered.
