Ayşegül Öngel

Born in Istanbul in 1966, Ayşegül Öngel graduated from the Faculty of Architecture at Middle East Technical University (METU) in 1988 and worked as an architect for many years, retiring from public service in Ankara as a department head. In 2004 Öngel began to focus on painting, taking still-life lessons from Gür Dalkıran and, for about eight years, painting lessons from Hüseyin Yıldırım at Nurol Art Gallery. Öngel's expressionist paintings combine gestural brushwork with the figure; in the course of the work, the figures dissolve and move toward abstraction. Öngel's first solo exhibition opened at the Mustafa Ayaz Museum in Ankara in 2017, and later exhibitions were shown in Ankara and Bodrum. Öngel works in a studio in the village of Boğaziçi in Milas.