I belong to a generation raised on trends that turn over every few weeks, and on a language the internet built for making things small. Girl math. Girl dinner. I'm just a girl. It sounds cute, bubbly, whimsical, and it is also how you reduce something to its dumber version. I was playing with that idea when I found this way of painting, so I will use its own word for it. Here is a girl painting.

What spills out of the handbag is the good and the violent and the ugly at once. A keychain bought for a laugh. Pearls that came from someone. Twenty euros crumpled into a pocket. Pepper spray. I paint all of it in the blues and pinks and purples that belong to plastic and packaging rather than to the still-life tradition, and at the scale you would give a portrait, because that is the scale the subject deserves.

Girlhood holds fear and wonder and whimsy in the same small space. We do not paint it, because it does not look like fine art. We decided it was unserious.

So call it girl painting. I'm just a girl anyway.

Biography

Karya Levni (b. 1999, Ankara) is a Turkish oil painter based in Brussels, raised on the Mediterranean coast in Antalya. She began with three years of atelier training in watercolour under Rukiye Garip in Balıkesir, then studied at weißensee kunsthochschule berlin, graduating with a Diplom in Fine Arts and Sculpture in 2025, passed with distinction. Her theory thesis examined the seventeenth-century separation of art from craft. For three years in Berlin she worked as a mastercopyist, painting on commission after Caravaggio, Rubens, Gérôme, Pieter Claesz and Vigée Le Brun. She now paints in oil on wood panel, in warm colour, on the subjects that tradition filed as decoration: fruit trees, coastline, and a series of skies with lambs in them.