Sevgi Wallack

Born in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1972 and now based in Washington, D.C., Sevgi Wallack is an artist whose practice is shaped by memory, movement, and the shifting qualities of light. Although she initially pursued other careers, Wallack ultimately returned to her true calling, recognizing that painting was not merely an interest but an essential mode of expression and a primary way of engaging with the world.

After living in New York for many years, where her sustained engagement with art deepened within the city’s dense creative life, she developed a studio practice that uses abstraction to consider how perception records and revises experience. Her work emerges from the convergence of observation and imagination, often capturing the emotional register of a moment rather than its literal appearance. Figures, landscapes, and dreamlike spaces surface in her paintings as shifting impressions—expressive, gestural, and deeply rooted in both personal and collective memory.

Wallack is more recently exploring abstraction as a language of memory, with her new black-and-white series on Yupo paper, created with palette knives and instinctive gestures. Figures emerge from darkness; landscapes dissolve into dreamlike atmospheres. The surfaces bear the imprint of movement, as if recording the passage of time and the shifting contours of consciousness. These works are not representations of the visible world but manifestations of interior landscapes. Through this process, her paintings become visual records of movement, perception, and transformation. 

Wallack’s work has been exhibited in group shows nationally, including at First Street Gallery, New York; the Hill Center, Washington, D.C.; Medford Arts Gallery, New Jersey; and the San Diego Watercolor Society, California.