Dilara Gelhasan creates paintings that map inner worlds.
Her practice is rooted in painting but reaches beyond into psychology, philosophy, and spirituality. Drawing from personal memories and experiences, subconscious impulses, and emotional states, she explores the human condition as a shifting landscape: thought, instinct, emotion, memory, mood.

Nothing static. Nothing finished. Always shifting. Always becoming.
Her work invites the viewer to think beyond reality; to look beneath surface perception, and step into the unstable terrains of inner experience.
Gelhasan refers to her works as Maps of Being. It's an ongoing, lifelong framework for exploring the mind, body, and emotional self through painting. This system isn’t about narrative or resolution. It’s about staying with the unknown, witnessing how internal states move, change, collide, and dissolve. And how these internal states interact with the outer world.
Her process is intuitive, layered, and often automatic. Gestures emerge without conscious editing. Textures collect and record moments of emotional climate. Surfaces evolve, accumulate, break apart. The result is work that invites reflection, ambiguity, and open interpretation. The viewer is not asked to understand but to experience.
Her paintings are divided into three interconnected explorations:
Gestures – subconscious mark-making and automatic gestures, bypassing control to let the unconscious mind surface through action.
Mindscapes – abstract landscapes that reflect memory, perception, and the space between internal and external reality.
Imprints – textured surfaces that preserve residues of mood; emotional recordings of moments passed through the body.
While Gelhasan primarily works in acrylic, her materials shift depending on the piece. Oil, ink, biro, gouache, watercolour, collage, and mixed media all find space in her practice. Her drawings often serve as studies in line and instinctive mark-making, complementing her painting process by allowing forms to emerge more freely.
Born in Cyprus, raised in Turkey, and now living in London, Gelhasan’s perspective is shaped by cultural movement and personal history. Her work reflects this fluidity; always in flux, never fully resolved.
For her, painting is not about answers. It’s about recording states of being as they appear, disappear, and transform.
Contact: dilaragelhasan@hotmail.com / instagram @dilaragelhasanart
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