Simona Gür

Simona Gür began painting while she was still flying. Eleven years as a flight attendant, more than ninety countries — and painting was what she came back to between rotations: an escape from all that motion, and the thing that kept her on the ground.

She spent over a decade in Dubai. Now she moves between Antalya and Trebišov, the Slovak town where she grew up. That back-and-forth is part of why her paintings read less like depictions of things than like traces — of energy, of mood, of something felt rather than observed.

She works with her hands and fingers, no brushes. It is slower and more physical, and you can see it in the finished work: the texture, the layering, the way colour looks pushed into the canvas rather than laid on top. She is drawn to nature and its rhythms, and to Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner, de Kooning, Van Gogh and Monet — the last of whom shares a name with her daughter, and with the paintings she made for her.

Her work has been shown from Sharjah to London, New York and Palma, and hangs in private collections across twelve countries as well as at the Slovak Embassy in Abu Dhabi. Paintings made before 2021 are signed Simona Jachimecová, her maiden name.

There is nothing more abstract than reality.Giorgio Morandi