Hamdi Eser’s “Gecekonduda Kış” at Galeri Soyut, Ankara: Painting Winter on the City’s Edge

Every Ankara resident knows the view, even if few stop to look at it: a hillside of low houses under snow, a chimney breathing smoke into a grey sky, a minibus slithering down a road that was never quite planned. Painter Hamdi Eser has spent the past three years looking at exactly that. The result is Hamdi Eser’s “Gecekonduda Kış” at Galeri Soyut in Ankara, a solo exhibition of oil paintings on view from 30 October to 11 November 2026, with an opening on the evening of Friday 30 October.

What is a gecekondu, and why paint it?

The word literally means “landed overnight”. It names the self-built houses that migrants from rural Anatolia put up on the edges of Turkish cities from the mid-twentieth century onward, often on land they did not own. In Ankara, a capital planned on paper as a modern republican city, the gecekondu grew up around the plan — and became home to generations. Today many of these neighbourhoods are being cleared for apartment blocks, which gives any painting of them a quiet documentary charge.

Eser’s title, “Winter in the Gecekondu”, chooses the hardest season. According to the gallery, the paintings show the cold of winter and the daily rhythm of shared life: houses climbing snowy slopes, winding roads, minibuses and taxis on wet asphalt, smoke from stovepipes, and one view of the whole settlement seen from above.

A teacher who paints the city he knows

Born in 1970 in Akdağmadeni, Yozgat, Eser went to school in Ankara and studied painting at Gazi University’s Gazi Faculty of Education between 1991 and 1994. His career has run in parallel with teaching: art classes in Suruç, Şanlıurfa, in the late 1990s, then more than a decade at a primary school in Bala, and since 2010 at the Çankaya Başkent Public Education Centre in Ankara. That biography matters. This is a painter who has crossed the city by bus for decades, not a visitor sketching from a car window.

His exhibition record is steady rather than flashy: solo shows at Doku Sanat Galerisi and Galeri Kambur in Istanbul in 2025 and 2024, Artsan Sanat Galerisi in Ankara in 2024, Ziraat Bankası Kuğulu Sanat Galerisi in 2013 and the Mersin State Fine Arts Gallery as far back as 1996. With Galeri Soyut he has shown in the “Yeni Aralık” group exhibitions of 2019 and 2022 and at ARTANKARA 2026.

Against the picturesque

Snow is a dangerous subject for a painter. It flatters everything; it turns poverty into a Christmas card. Eser seems well aware of the risk. His statement for the exhibition says plainly that he does not want to romanticise poverty. The gecekondu appears instead as a place of difficulty, resilience and solidarity — and as evidence of urban inequality. He describes the series as showing a way of living rather than a season, and says he wants viewers to feel they are standing inside the scene, asking themselves what actually makes a city.

That intention shapes the painting. Wet asphalt, exhaust and smoke are the textures of the work as much as the white of the snow. The traffic — shared minibuses, yellow taxis — places these neighbourhoods inside the city’s circulation rather than outside it. And the aerial view, a single work among many street-level scenes, steps back to show the settlement as a whole organism, roofs pressed together for warmth.

The exhibition in numbers

• 32 paintings, all oil on canvas and all titled “Untitled”, dated 2024–2026.
• Formats from intimate 30 × 30 cm panels to 110 × 110 cm canvases — the square format recurs throughout.
• Hall B of Galeri Soyut’s 600-square-metre Yıldızevler space; a virtual tour is available on the gallery website.

Leaving the works untitled is a deliberate choice: no single house or street is singled out, so the series reads as one continuous account of a place.

Galeri Soyut and the Ankara scene

Galeri Soyut runs two spaces in Çankaya, at Yıldızevler and Çayyolu, and has become one of the capital’s busiest commercial galleries, with several halls opening shows on the same evening. Visitors on 30 October will find Eser in Hall B alongside other new exhibitions in the building. Ankara’s gallery life is smaller and more local than Istanbul’s, and that is its strength: it is one of the few places where painters working on the city’s own social realities find a regular audience.

Why it matters for collectors and painters

For collectors of Turkish figurative painting, “Gecekonduda Kış” offers a coherent body of work on a subject with real historical weight, at a moment when the landscape it records is disappearing. For painters, it is a useful lesson in how to handle a sentimental subject without sentiment: keep the traffic, keep the mud, and let the snow do its work only where it belongs. And for anyone who has lived in Ankara, it may be the first time those familiar hills look like a subject worthy of a gallery wall.

Visiting information

Galeri Soyut, Şehit Mustafa Doğan Cad. No: 26/A, Yıldızevler, Çankaya, Ankara. 30 October – 11 November 2026; opening Friday 30 October, 18:00–20:00. Monday–Saturday 10:00–19:00, closed Sunday; free admission. Phone +90 532 550 99 94; the gallery recommends booking a visit. See our Gecekonduda Kış listing for full details and the official exhibition page for images and the virtual tour. For more openings in Turkey and beyond, browse Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.