In Your Presence, We Dissolve, Together: Melike Kara

Ida Yang, Leap Magazine, March 1, 2016

Melike Kara’s paintings are striking in their apparent unframed simplicity. The paintings in “In Your Presence,” at Peres Projects in Berlin, appear as if uncompleted or unaccomplished – works in progress, raw and rudimentary. At the same time, her outlines are so strong, so intense that they recall Picasso or Twombly or Camille Henrot’s “Tropics of Love.” What interests Kara is the global examination of self: What exactly is a self? How does it define itself? Can it be formed from experiences and emotions and their conditions? She attempts to answer these questions from the position of her viewers.