ISTANBUL.- Galerist presents Elif Uras’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery, titled Earth on Their Hands, opening on 16 September, concurrent with the 18th Istanbul Biennial. The exhibition invites viewers to reconsider women’s labour within historical and material culture. For the first time, Uras brings together wheel-thrown and hand-built ceramic works created in New York with slip-cast pieces produced in Iznik – the historic centre of Turkish pottery since the Ottoman era.

Her voluptuous vessels merge the figurative with the abstract: optical patterns drawn from Islamic geometry ripple across sculptural forms inspired by Neolithic clay figurines native to her geography. Through the use of slips, washes, underglaze paint, and gold lustre, Uras creates richly textured, relief-like surfaces that shimmer with layered resonance.

The exhibition also includes ceramic plates and tablets exploring themes of female labour, communal solidarity, and support – in a context where only 30 percent of women in Turkey are formally employed. Uras traces the historical connection between Anatolian women and gold, reimagining the precious metal not as a symbol of patriarchal power, but as a marker of the invisible and unpaid labour traditionally performed by women. Informed by the prehistoric, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine legacies of the region, she reclaims suppressed histories and amplifies enduring lineages. Gilded female figures populate the surfaces of her ceramics, engaged in acts of caregiving, domestic labour, agriculture, and heritage crafts like weaving and pottery. Uras transforms these undervalued activities into expressions of resilience and resistance, rendering them timeless through mythic form.

Earth on Their Hands will be on view until November 8, 2025, from 11:00 to 19:00, except for Sundays.

Elif Uras attended Brown University and Columbia Law School before receiving a BFA from School of Visual Arts and MFA from Columbia School of the Arts. Her practice spans ceramics, drawing and painting.

In her works, Uras explores ideas of gender and class related to representation of women across different geographies and time. She often employs labour intensive intricate patterns on her surfaces inspired by diverse art historic sources including prehistoric art, antiquity, Islamic geometry, Iznik tiles and Western modernism. Her work also engages with questions of tradition, ornament and labour, especially feminized labour.

Often working on location in Iznik (Nicaea), where the most renowned tiles and ceramics of the Ottoman Empire were produced centuries ago, Uras produces works in ceramic that incorporate the non-figurative visual vocabulary of Iznik with the female body. Subverting tradition the intricate geometric and naturalistic patterns are employed to paint and draw on vessels whose forms allude to the ideas of femininity in a rapidly modernizing yet traditional society. Her works have also been exhibited at Metropolitan Museum, MoMA PS1, Salon 94, New York, 9th Shanghai Biennale and Pera Museum. Uras’s works are included in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Victoria and Albert Museum. Uras was an Artist-in-Residence at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York in 2020-2021.