Artist: Austin Eddy

Dirimart presents Galata Sunset, Austin Eddy’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition brings together a new body of paintings created in the artist’s Brooklyn studio, inspired by his visit to Istanbul in the summer of 2024. Drawing on the city’s texture and light, Eddy develops a colour-driven, open-ended narrative approach that captures the poetry of everyday life through the interplay of figurative and abstract forms.

Eddy’s practice explores the relationship between form and sentiment, weaving together the lyricism of daily experience with a distinctive visual language. His compositions oscillate between fiction and observation, taking cues from the modernist tradition while asserting their own unique idiom. Through stylised forms and layered surfaces, Eddy creates evocative scenes that stir associations, transforming emotions, relationships, and elements of nature into a new alphabet. Recurring motifs – birds and organic shapes – offer a narrative that feels at once familiar and instinctive.

On canvas, Eddy brings together sharp edges and loose brushwork, generating a poetic tension between form and colour. Colour plays a central role in his work: at times it structures the narrative, while at others it simply reveals a state of mind. His compositions, built upon vertical and horizontal planes, shift fluidly between figuration and abstraction, inviting viewers to search for narrative threads within the painting.

The works in Galata Sunset reflect Eddy’s desire to immerse viewers in atmospheres shaped by colour. Here, the relationship between light and shadow is not confined to defined forms, but unfolds across the surface through expansive fields of colour. Each canvas registers an inner landscape, a trace of emotion, or an abstract embodiment of a fleeting state of being. Though Eddy’s process is direct and intuitive, it rests upon a foundation of structural awareness and formal discipline. In this way, universal emotions and deeply personal resonances exist side by side.

The titles of Eddy’s recent works often derive from everyday actions, memories, or poetic expressions. When naming his pieces, he turns to nature, observations of particular times of day, and personal experiences – including this exhibition developed in response to a textual expression he came across during his visit to Istanbul in the summer of 2024. These titles deepen the viewer’s engagement with the paintings, offering an emotional compass.

Transforming nature, memory, and the fabric of daily life into abstract forms and colours and translating his inner landscapes into a universal language of emotion, Austin Eddy presents Galata Sunset at Dirimart Pera from 2 October to 2 November 2025.