SECIL EREL
BEING AT HOME
D Contemporary inaugurates its new premises at 1 Birdcage Walk with Being at Home, a solo exhibition by Turkish-British painter Seçil Erel. This new body of work expands the artist’s long-standing enquiry into belonging, abstraction, and the metaphysics of place. Erel’s practice emerges from a life lived between geographies—between Istanbul and London, between the memory of origin and the openness of arrival. Her paintings, layered with intricate chromatic fields and modular geometries, articulate an inner cartography: a mapping not of territory, but of consciousness. In Erel’s hands, abstraction becomes a language of navigation—a way to reconcile motion with stillness, distance with intimacy. At the heart of Being at Home lies a paradox: to be at home is both to dwell and to transcend. Erel’s canvases hover in this threshold.
Through their tactile surfaces and measured rhythms, they evoke the fragile balance between separation and connection, solitude and belonging. The viewer is invited into this liminal space—not to observe, but to inhabit it. Guided by the quiet wisdom of Rumi’s insight, “Wherever I am, I am at home,” Erel approaches painting as a meditative act, a means of transmuting pain into acceptance and displacement into renewal. Her work affirms that home is not a static construct but a dynamic state of awareness—an interior architecture of the soul. Dedicated to refugees and those who endure loss, exploitation, and exile, Being at Home transforms the personal into the universal. In Erel’s vision, abstraction is not an escape from reality, but a return to its essence—a space where form and spirit converge, and where the human longing for belonging finds its quiet resolution.
“Being at Home invites us to find stillness amid movement, to feel at home within our own bodies.
ARTWORKS
SECIL EREL
Seçil Erel (b. Istanbul) is a Turkish-British contemporary painter whose work investigates the concepts of belonging, identity, and transformation through abstraction. She received both her BFA (2003) and MFA (2007) in Painting from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul, where she developed a distinct visual language rooted in geometry, rhythm, and layered chromatic fields.
Now living and working between London and Istanbul, Erel’s practice is informed by the fluid experience of migration and cultural duality. Her paintings explore the relationship between structure and intuition, order and emotion, drawing inspiration from architecture, mapping, and the spiritual poetics of space. In her work, abstraction becomes a way to translate the invisible—memory, consciousness, and the passage of time—into a tactile and contemplative visual form.
Erel has exhibited widely in Turkey and the United Kingdom, including solo exhibitions at D Contemporary (London), İMOGA Art Gallery (Istanbul), and Siyah Beyaz Gallery (Ankara). Her upcoming exhibition, Being at Home (2025), inaugurates D Contemporary’s new location at 1 Birdcage Walk. She has been shortlisted for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and participated in numerous international art fairs and residencies.
Her work is held in private and institutional collections across Europe and the Middle East. Erel continues to explore abstraction as a universal language of connection—an ever-evolving dialogue between place, presence, and perception.