Tuğçe Diri
Visual Artist / Painter

Tuğçe Diri (b. 1984, Eskişehir) is a visual artist and painter living and working in Istanbul. She graduated in 2010 from the Painting Department and the Applied Lithography Workshop at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, and completed her master’s degree in 2019 with the thesis “Reflections of Traditional Arts in Contemporary Turkish Painting.” Drawing, which lies at the core of her artistic practice, is not a point of departure but an experimental field in which thought and intuition evolve simultaneously.
Working in series on canvas and paper, Diri employs oil and acrylic paint alongside materials such as charcoal, ink, collage, fabric, lace, and thread to construct a multilayered visual language shaped around themes of identity, memory, cultural heritage, cartography, and nature. Influenced by a broad spectrum of movements and techniques—from Arte Povera and Surrealism to the dynamism of Abstract Expressionism and the design and text-image traditions of Islamic arts—she re-synthesizes different societies’ conceptions of history, memory, and visual culture through material exploration.
Concepts of trace, transmission, and continuity occupy a central position in her practice; meaning emerges not from a single center but through repetition and the accumulation of memory over time. In her recent works, architectural forms are approached as acts of reproduction and erasure, articulated through textures generated by the frottage technique and interventions in drawing. Constructed through a metonymic progression from part to whole, these architectural images prioritize remembered traces and material residues over literal representations of space. Shaped around notions of handcraft, labor, and productivity, Diri’s practice renders the boundaries between art and craft permeable, while treating tradition as a living formation that is continually reconstituted through encounter. Her works are included in various private and institutional collections.