Ege Subaşı at Chi Art Gallery, Istanbul: “Geride Bir Şey Unuttuğumdur” and the Painting of Memory

Everyone knows the feeling: you close the door, take three steps, and stop — sure you have forgotten something, unable to say what. Ege Subaşı has built an exhibition out of that pause. Ege Subaşı’s painting exhibition “Geride Bir Şey Unuttuğumdur” at Chi Art Gallery in Istanbul, her first solo show, is on view in Kadıköy from 3 November to 5 December 2026.

A title borrowed from Adalet Ağaoğlu

The title — which might be rendered as “It’s that I left something behind” — comes from a sentence in Yazsonu (End of Summer), a novel by Adalet Ağaoğlu, one of the major voices of modern Turkish literature. It is a telling choice. Ağaoğlu’s fiction is famous for its attention to inner time: memory folding back on itself, the past leaking into the present. Subaşı borrows not a story but a state of mind, the slightly unsettled feeling of a life that keeps leaving traces behind it.

The “fog veil”: who is Ege Subaşı?

Subaşı is an emerging painter whose work Chi Art Gallery has followed closely. She first appeared there in “Fluid Stories”, a two-person show with Alla Güner that was a parallel event of the 18th Istanbul Biennial. The gallery describes her practice as centred on self-awareness, identity and existential questioning, and on a recurring metaphor she calls the sis perdesi — the “fog veil”. In her portraits, faces seem to slide and figures lose their outlines, hovering between clarity and ambiguity. Rather than a stylistic effect, the blur works as a model of perception: we never see ourselves or others in perfect focus.

What the show contains

According to the gallery and press coverage, the exhibition combines portraits and landscapes on canvas with a group of installations. Its subject is the trace that time leaves on bodies, objects and landscapes — and in particular the small, quiet changes we rarely notice in daily life. Subaşı asks how past moments continue to live in memory and in the body, and how a memory is altered each time it is recalled. Our cover image, Biraz Daha Kalayım (“Let Me Stay a Little Longer”, 2026), captures that mood of reluctant departure: a title that sounds like something said at a doorway.

The show was developed with advisory support from T. Melis Golar, and it extends the concerns of Subaşı’s earlier paintings — the sense of incompleteness, of an image still forming — into a meditation on what we leave behind and what stays with us.

Chi Art Gallery and the Asian side

Founded in 2022, Chi Art Gallery sits on Operatör Cemil Topuzlu Caddesi in Çiftehavuzlar, between Fenerbahçe and Caddebostan, on Istanbul’s Asian shore. Most of the city’s commercial galleries cluster in Beyoğlu, Karaköy and Nişantaşı, so a young gallery building a programme in Kadıköy — and backing a first solo show — adds variety to the Istanbul scene. For visitors, it pairs naturally with a walk along the Bağdat Caddesi area and the seafront.

Why it matters

First solo exhibitions are where collectors can meet an artist before the market does. Subaşı arrives with a clear conceptual thread, a link to the Istanbul Biennial’s parallel programme and a literary frame that gives her paintings depth beyond their surfaces. For painters, the show is a useful study in how blur, veiling and soft edges can carry meaning — how the unfinished look of a face can say more about memory than a sharp likeness. And for anyone interested in the dialogue between Turkish literature and contemporary painting, the Ağaoğlu connection makes it worth the trip across the Bosphorus.

Visiting information

Chi Art Gallery, Fenerbahçe Mah., Operatör Cemil Topuzlu Cad. No: 39-E, Çiftehavuzlar, Kadıköy, İstanbul. 3 November – 5 December 2026. Open 11:00–19:00 (please confirm the opening days with the gallery). Phone +90 544 442 36 89, email [email protected]. See our Ege Subaşı exhibition listing, the official Chi Art Gallery website, and more shows on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.