‘Art de Vivre’ The Art of Living is the knowledge of how to enjoy life or practice it surrounded by aesthetic senses. Related to many branches of fine arts, the art of living contains all beauties which stimulate the five senses  ̶ decorating your home, breeding plants, being fed by pleasant smells and tastes, cultivated by literature, making an art collection briefly to take pleasure to live engaged with aesthetic. 

With the paintings which takes part at the exhibition Nihâl Martlı wandering at interiors of homes and rooms in which we spent plenty of time during the pandemic, and enters to the fiction that we have been into during this period; at the same time, she reconsiders the themes she painted before that pertains figure and lieu; space and floating.

With the theatrical compositions she creates in between real and surreal, she approaches the ‘Art of Living’ concept with irony. To her, ‘the art of living’ is actually a bit ‘the art of surviving’: embellishing your environment, practicing the life as an art, taking time to appreciate the beauty and the good taste of little things along with  struggling to be alive (?) to experience a kind of feeling of decadence, or self destruction. 

“Imprisoning the exterior into interior and living in a small and sterile world maybe was a new phenomenon for people at the beginning of the pandemic. To me, it was my fiction of ideal lifestyle for many years,” says Nihâl, while painting the records of her aesthetic perception or memories on the one hand. And on the other hand, in these places, she depicts women in divers moods – sometimes in a decadence or aging mode; floating-heroines and the self-portraits that the painter considers as ‘avatars’ blending with chansons; forms, compositions relevant to the art of surviving.