Early in Milan Kundera's novel “The Joke”, the protagonist asks: “Do you think demolition can be beautiful?”. This novel was written in the 60s, and in the 2000s the renowned avant-garde musician Stockhausen claimed that the attacks at the World Trade Center in New York were the the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos. Having condemned him back then, the art world now accepts he was right, carrying remnants found in the wreck into museums, labeling them as artworks.

The increasing amount of violence in the current century, and images of virtual violence in the digital age have an influence on art as well. In this regard, Gülderen Depas is in touch with current events, dealing with many themes ranging from terror attacks to disasters, rendering them dynamically in her paintings.

Using images from newspapers, movies, the internet and her own collection of photographs as starting points, the artist removes details or makes changes, cuts and adds; resulting in paintings that look different compared to their source material. Presented in elegant LED lightboxes, the paintings (which were made using traditional materials such as oil paints, brushes and palette knives), bring together the new and the old in an aesthetically pleasing manner, while creating an attractive dialectic aura with the odd disturbing dissonance of the images.