Carousel horses and sugary sweets like you’d find at a carnival are placed in front of the type of stained glass windows found in historic buildings in the kind of clash of old and new you’re unlikely to see in the real world. If the white rabbits haven’t already given it away, we’re descending into a Wonderland and this time artist Ipek Ergen is our guide in the surreal world of pop art aesthetics she’s created.
She’s inspired by Renaissance and other historical paintings and we can see that both in her style, the stained glass and the perfect capturing of poses that she’s inspired. However, each figure owes more to her love of Manga, anime and contemporary culture. It’s this collision of old and new, fine art and comic that creates her unique style that owes a debt to both worlds.
The stained glass background gives each work a spiritual tone with the light shining through onto the ‘heroines’ in each piece, they may look like vulnerable young women but they are taking space in each work and much like the pose in many historical works their stance requires the viewer to look up at them – as persons for veneration.
Ipek says each work represents a personal part of her journey but she doesn’t want to give much away about the background to each painting, as she’s keen for us to draw our own stories from each piece. Is the young woman on the horse blowing a bubble of bubblegum a look back at the innocence of youth? Is the painting of three women lounging together a reference to the power of friendships in early life? And is the woman with the iced coffee in hand and the faraway stare at a crossroads in her life?
I also feel like there are fun and playful elements to her works, channelling the joyful moments from our youths that we no longer savour as we get older. It’s asking us to remember times when we lived life to its fullest and recapture some of that joie de vivre. When we used to hang out with friends with no particular aim, before the world of deadlines and full calendars directed our lives towards something more orderly.
By not providing us with the story behind each work we’re relying on our memories of childhood, whether that be late night videogaming, days out at the cinema, cycling through neighbourhoods or kicking around a football with no objective in mind.
Ipek wants us to form our own stories from each painting, imagining each one as a film still or a comic book panel and creating our own narratives for these characters, what have they just experienced? What’s coming next for them? And how will their past experiences shape the person they become in the future?
With the playing card and teapot references to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, she’s asking us to disappear down rabbit holes of our own making and use her paintings as jumping-off points or references in our own stories.
All images copyright Ipek Ergen. You can find out more about the artist on Instagram or her website.
