Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, the torn, distorted, and intertwined bodies of Sema Maskili confront us with our innate savagery, the one we desperately try to hide beneath the veneer of our so-called civilization. Her imposing canvases grab you by the throat from the first glance. It is impossible to look away from these amalgams of flesh where the human anatomy, mistreated by furious brushstrokes, transforms into a grotesque theater of our fundamental bestiality. I have rarely seen contemporary painting so daring in its way of exploring the depths of the human soul.
Born in 1980 in Edirne, Turkey, Maskili forged an unmistakable style after years of rigorous study at the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul. Her classical training is evident in her technical mastery, but it is in expressionist distortion that she finds her true voice. The influences are obvious: Gericault, Goya, Bacon, Freud, but Maskili completely digests them to create something radically personal. And it hurts. Terribly hurts. Her work rips your eyes open to force you to see what you would prefer to ignore.
Her series “Power Creates Monsters,” which she has been developing since 2017, represents the apex of her artistic vision. The title itself is a conceptual slap, direct, brutal, uncompromising. In these monumental works like “The Power Worshippers” (230 x 200 cm) or “Barbarians” (185 x 145 cm), Maskili shows us without filter what the will to dominate does to our bodies and minds. The human silhouettes collide with animalistic violence, transforming into disjointed masses of flesh, deprived of individual identity, reduced to their drive for domination. Humanity is brought down to its rawest dimension, that of a perpetual struggle for supremacy.
This exploration of the violence inherent in human nature inevitably evokes Nietzschean theories on the “will to power.” Nietzsche, in “Beyond Good and Evil,” states that “life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the stranger and the weaker, oppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and, at least in the mildest cases, exploitation” [1]. This is exactly what Maskili captures in her chaotic compositions, this primordial drive for domination that precedes all morality, this vital force which, when perverted, transforms human beings into predators of their kind.
Maskili’s painting is not simply an illustration of Nietzschean concepts; she pushes them to their visual paroxysm, embodying them in tortured bodies struggling for symbolic survival. In her vision, the “will to power” is not the creative force Nietzsche sometimes valued, but rather its destructive side, its monstrous drift when no longer tempered by any ethical consideration. Maskili’s paintings are populated by degenerated superhumans, drunk on their own power but emptied of all humanity.
Her bodies are not simply bodies; they are ideological battlefields, contested territories where visceral power struggles take place. Look at “Mob Psychology” (110 x 85 cm), where group dynamics transform into an uncontrollable horde. The artwork dissects how the individual, absorbed into the crowd, strips away her humanity to give in to the vilest instincts. I am struck by the way Maskili uses shades of yellow, green, and citrus pink to suggest a toxic atmosphere where abhorrent behaviors proliferate. Her chromatic choices are clinically precise, evoking moral decay as surely as gangrene signals the imminent death of tissues.
Through her canvases, Maskili asserts herself as one of the most striking voices in contemporary Turkish art. It is no accident that she was one of the three laureates of the Luxembourg Art Prize in 2022, a prestigious international contemporary art award. Her artistic vision transcends cultural boundaries to reach a universal truth about our human condition. She is among those rare artists who manage to capture something essential about our era, the tension between our civilizational aspirations and primitive impulses that constantly threatens to implode our fragile social contract.
Maskili’s strength lies in her categorical refusal of easy aestheticism. She rejects conventional beauty to create images that deeply unsettle and disturb. Her distorted bodies recall Michel Foucault’s vision of power relations inscribed directly on the human body. In “Discipline and Punish,” Foucault writes that “the body is directly plunged into a political field; power relations exercise an immediate hold on it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, compel it to work” [2]. The mutilated and intertwined bodies of Maskili perfectly illustrate this theory; they are the terrain where power and domination relations are exercised, the passive receptacles of institutional and interpersonal violence.
Foucault’s approach to the body as a site of inscription of power relations finds a striking visual translation in Maskili’s work. Each deformation, each anatomical distortion, can be read as the physical manifestation of normalized social violence. In “Barbarians” (185 x 145 cm), the piled-up bodies, lacking distinct faces, evoke the “political anatomy” Foucault talks about, these docile bodies produced by the disciplinary mechanisms of modern society. But Maskili goes further by showing the rebellion of flesh against these constraints, its refusal to fully conform to the norms that seek to domesticate it.
The metaphysical spaces in which Maskili places her figures amplify their existential alienation. These abstract backgrounds with abrupt luminous transitions, their locked colors and uncertain landscapes, symbolize a world slipping away beneath our feet, a universe devoid of stable landmarks where beings wander aimlessly. They are non-places in the anthropological sense, spaces of transition where identity and personal history dissolve into anonymity. Maskili’s figures seem condemned to perpetual wandering in these pictorial limboes, neither quite here nor quite elsewhere, suspended in an uncomfortable in-between that reflects the precarious condition of the contemporary individual.
In her work “Self-Portrait”, Maskili offers us a moment of raw truth with a rare intensity. She depicts herself with cut hair, in tribute to the resistance of Iranian women following the death of Mahsa Amini. It is a painting that transcends aesthetics to reach a strong political dimension, an act of solidarity that situates her work within contemporary feminist struggles. Through this gesture, Maskili asserts that art is not only a formal or conceptual exploration; it is an ethical stance against abuses of power, a statement that engages the artist’s responsibility in the face of the injustices of her time.
This portrait represents a pivotal moment in Maskili’s approach, the instant when the universal and the particular, the personal and the political, come together in a powerful synthesis. By cutting her hair, the artist makes her own body the place of symbolic resistance. She thus joins the long tradition of artists who have used their bodies as a political medium, but she does so with a sobriety that avoids the trap of the spectacular. There is nothing gratuitous in this gesture; it fits within the deep logic of her work on power dynamics and the reification of bodies.
Do not expect to come out unscathed from an encounter with Maskili’s work. Her paintings will haunt you, burrowing under your skin like painful splinters that no conceptual tweezers can extract. She forces you to face that shadowy part of ourselves that we prefer to ignore, our potential for monstrosity when we yield to the temptation of power. Her work is a merciless mirror held up to a humanity that generally prefers flattering reflections to disturbing truths.
Maskili’s violent color blocks and frenetic brushstrokes recall German Expressionism, but with a contemporary intensity that reflects the specific tensions of our time. Her palette, often dominated by cadaverous greens, flesh pinks, and sickly yellows, reinforces the impression of flesh corrupted by systemic violence. These chromatic choices are not gratuitous; they convey a lucid and disenchanted vision of humanity, a gaze that has penetrated appearances to reach the hard core of our condition.
Maskili’s pictorial technique is particularly interesting. Her brushstroke alternates between anatomical precision inherited from the classical masters and expressionist distortions that translate the violence of emotions. This technical duality perfectly reflects the central tension of her work, that between our veneer of civilization and our primitive impulses. In certain areas of her paintings, she perfectly controls her medium, creating passages of remarkable fineness, before switching to more impulsive, almost wild gestures that suggest a loss of control, the eruption of chaos in the precarious order of human existence.
Maskili’s art fits into a pictorial tradition going back to Goya and his “Disasters of War,” where horror is shown without concession. Like Goya, she refuses to look away from the abysses of the human condition. But unlike the Spanish master, she does not document specific historical atrocities; she solely explores the universal psychological mechanisms that make them possible, the mental structures that allow ordinary human beings to commit extraordinary acts of cruelty. It is this archetypal dimension that gives her work its universal power.
Some critics might see in her work an excessive pessimism, a reductive vision of humanity that leaves no room for transcendence or redemption. But that would miss the essential of her approach. Maskili does not condemn humanity; she questions it with relentless lucidity. Her painting is a distorting yet necessary mirror that reflects our own moral ambivalence back to us, to those gray areas of consciousness where our stated principles clash with our unspeakable impulses. In this sense, her work is deeply ethical; it invites us to an uncomfortable but potentially healing introspection.
In “Power Causes Monsters Series (4)” (140 x 165 cm), Maskili specifically addresses how oppressed women can replicate the same patterns of domination among themselves when placed in a context that values competition and hierarchy. It is a nuanced analysis of power dynamics that does not settle for a binary oppressor/oppressed view. She shows how domination structures internalize and perpetuate themselves at all societal levels, how victims can become tormentors in turn within a vicious cycle that only reinforces the system they claim to fight. This lucidity in facing human contradictions is precisely what grants Maskili’s work its intellectual credibility and emotional depth.
The place of women in power dynamics is moreover a recurring theme in Maskili’s work. Not that she adopts an essentialist stance that would see femininity as a guarantee against violence; on the contrary, she shows how women, just as much as men, can be corrupted by power when exercising it according to the same dominating paradigms. In doing so, she aligns with Foucault’s perspective on the diffuse and omnipresent nature of power, which is not reduced to a simple binary relation between dominants and dominated but flows throughout the social body in a complex network of micro-relations.
Through her recent solo exhibitions, including the most recent “Power Causes Monsters” at the Istanbul Concept Gallery (2023), Maskili has developed a coherent visual language that relentlessly explores the tensions between our ethical aspirations and our animalistic impulses. Her approach is not merely aesthetic; it is deeply philosophical. It belongs to the tradition of great questioners of the human condition, those artists who do not merely depict the world but seek to reveal its hidden mechanisms, the invisible cogs that determine our behaviors and relationships.
What strikes in Maskili’s artistic evolution is the coherence of her vision across the years. From her first solo exhibition “Dağınık Düşler” (Disordered Dreams) in 2006 to her current exploration of power dynamics, one perceives a logical progression, a constant deepening of her favorite themes. Each new exhibition does not represent a break with the previous ones but rather a deeper excavation of the same psychic territories, as if the artist patiently dug a tunnel towards the subterranean truth of our humanity.
The exhibition “What is Good, What is Evil?” (Qu’est-ce que le bien ? Qu’est-ce que le mal ?) from 2017 marks an important turning point in her career. By directly addressing the fundamental ethical question that has haunted humanity since its origins, Maskili explicitly places her work within a philosophical perspective. She then evokes the figure of Bosch and his “Garden of Earthly Delights,” establishing a parallel between her own approach and that of the Flemish master who, under the guise of religious imagery, delivered a profound meditation on humanity’s follies and vices. Like Bosch, Maskili creates her own iconography, her own visual language to explore the moral contradictions of our species.
Maskili’s work reminds us that the most significant contemporary art is not that which comforts us in our certainties but that which confronts us with our most painful contradictions. In a world saturated with polished, marketed images, formatted for risk-free consumption, her paintings act like an electric shock, awakening our sensitivity dulled by daily visual bombardment, abruptly bringing us back to the essential: this perpetual struggle between our civilizational aspirations and our destructive impulses.
Maskili’s art is political, but not in the trivial sense of defending this or that specific cause. It is political in a much deeper sense, in that it questions the very foundations of living together, the conditions of possibility for a society that would not be simply ruled by the law of the strongest. By unflinchingly exposing the latent violence underlying our social interactions, she invites us to imagine other modes of relationship, other ways of exercising power that would not necessarily involve crushing the other.
In this regard, it is tempting to see in Maskili’s approach an illustration of Nietzsche’s theses on the possibility of a transmutation of values. By confronting us with the horror of what we are, or at least what we can become when we give in to our domination impulses, she paradoxically opens a space to imagine what we could be. Her painting does not offer easy solutions or miracle cures for human violence. It merely diagnoses with surgical precision, leaving each viewer the responsibility to meditate on the implications of what they see.
If you are not ready to be unsettled, to question your own shadow side, move along. Sema Maskili’s art is not made to decorate your sterilized interiors or impress your guests at social dinners. It is there to shake you up, disturb you, force you to look at what you would prefer to ignore, the violence lurking at the very heart of our humanity. And perhaps, in this uncomfortable confrontation with ourselves, we might find the resources to invent new ways of being human together, beyond the cycles of violence and domination that have until now defined our collective history.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil,” Complete Philosophical Works, Gallimard, 1971.
- Michel Foucault, “Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,” Gallimard, 1975.
