Taya Urgancı is a Turkish-American artist, born on February 11, 1998, in New York City. She studied Industrial Design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) before transferring to Florence Design School, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Florence, Italy.

Her path to painting has been one of continual searching. She began in ceramics and sculpture, learning to think through clay, weight and volume, before moving across the wider fine arts and into performance, where the body itself became the material. Each discipline left something behind and opened the way to the next. Painting is where they converge: the physicality of sculpture, the immediacy of performance and the long patience of the studio meet on a single surface. It is not where she began, but where everything she has tried has carried her.

She is currently developing a new collection of work in preparation for a solo exhibition. The collection moves between large-scale paintings on canvas and a series of black-and-white works on paper, bringing together figuration, abstraction and densely layered surfaces.

Education

BFA, Florence Design School, Florence, Italy

Industrial Design, School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC)

Exhibitions

Forthcoming — First solo exhibition (in preparation)

2017–2018 — Now You See Me, group exhibition. Exhibited the Tobacco series