Şebnem Kayhan’s painting practice explores the shifting relationship between inner experience and inhabited space. The face, body, gaze, movement, and city are approached not as separate subjects, but as interconnected layers of seeing, sensing, remembering, and becoming visible. Shaped by her background in urban planning and urban design, her spatial way of thinking transforms faces into inner maps, emotions into surfaces and traces, and everyday encounters into visual records.

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While Maps of Our Faces, Surfaces of the Soul, Beyond Looking, and Traces of Emotion focus on inner experience, Metro Portraits and Rome Diaries turn the gaze towards the city, movement, and encounters within everyday life.

 

Created through acrylic, watercolour, ink, oil pastel, and mixed media, these works form an evolving visual archive of the relationships we build with ourselves, with others, and with the places we inhabit.