Kaan Ege Önal’s practice is rooted in painting and extends through an exploration of the body as both subject and structure. His works bring together visual fragments drawn from classical imagery, cultural symbols and contemporary references, forming compositions that appear at once familiar and unstable.

Rather than treating history as something fixed, Önal approaches it as a living system—one that is continuously reinterpreted through image-making. Figures dissolve, surfaces shift, and forms are reconfigured, suggesting that meaning is not inherited intact but constructed through time.

Working across layered compositions and altered figuration, his paintings operate as sites of tension between past and present, permanence and transformation. In this way, the body becomes a vessel through which broader questions of identity, memory and cultural transmission are negotiated.

Within the context of Adler & Moriarty, Önal’s work engages with the idea of the image as a structure that carries and reshapes meaning across time.

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Kaan Ege Önal (b. 1996, Kütahya, Turkey) studied painting at Mersin University before completing his Master’s degree at the University of Osnabrück, Germany. Since 2022, he has exhibited widely across Germany, including presentations at institutions such as Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Kunsthalle Bremen, and the Deutscher Bundestag, Berlin.