She was born in Istanbul in 1966. She has a degree from the Department of Mathematics and Astronomy of the Faculty of Science of Istanbul University. After graduation, she started to work as a professional painter. She worked with Sabri Berkel and Hülya Düzenli from 1984 to 1994. During that period she studied different mentalities and perspectives. She worked for private workshops for some time before setting up her own workshop. She has held a number of personal exhibitions and participated in joint exhibitions.
She is the member of International Plastic Arts Association (A.I.A.P.).
about her work
Benhabib’s works exhibit a dense sensitivity and a dynamism. First of all, she is an experimenter. This experimenting attitude, which manifests itself usually in an expressionist way, exhibits a passion for renewing itself. Ben Habib has achieved great advance in a short time. In her later works, she is trying to surpass the two-dimensional world of painting.
Her paintings have, in a sense, the depth of relieves. Thrown away objects of daily life are a common element of her works. They add a latent conceptual dimension to her works. The expressionist position of the artist thus reaches a point of explosion with an improvised intellectuality. All this endows his paintings with an extraordinary dynamism.
On the other hand, the main characteristic of her more regular crayon and charcoal pencil works is bold contours surrounding forms rapidly changing to white through homogeneous stages.
RESEARCH GAINING MOMEMTUM WITHIN SELi BENHABiB FROM AUTOBIOGRAPHIC CONCEPT TO CULTURAL STATEMENTS
LEVENT ÇALIKOĞLU-1998
In those days,Benhabib deals with the shared social and cultural values of the 20th century using those new combinations which are not reminiscent of any conventional art object and also connects the areas of sharing relating to her to the shared problematic of the masses. She taps on linguistic analyses and concepts of semeiology. First of all, she considers herself as a part of the social and cultural structure within this development and then investigates the crushing impact of some concepts of the daily life and consumption language, that we often use without thinking, such as communication, software or transportation, on the human psyche. She tries to analyze cultural functions or situations within the framework of the conceptual nature of the definition of art.
The concern for technical calculation and exhibition observed in these new works of Benhabib is also observed in her previous works. She usually puts materials which have lost their function and which cannot be recycled into wooden boxes.
seli benhabib 