Melike Kara: Everything Knows
François Ghebaly is pleased to present Everything Knows, Melike Kara’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery and her first presentation in Los Angeles.
Working with oil, ink, and ground coffee, Kara’s paintings unite tactile materiality with a generous openness. Swirls of coffee grounds and sweeping brushstrokes hover at the edge of legibility; forms emerge and dissolve in the same breath. Kara uses coffee for its metaphorical and material qualities. The grounds, associated in some cultures with divination rituals, are inverted in her work: rather than interpreting stains to foretell the future, she allows liquid and sediment to mark the canvas without teleological intent. The coffee’s obstinacy—its refusal to be fully absorbed—becomes a partner in the painting process, recording the artist’s moment-to-moment decisions and sustaining a tension between control and release.
The exhibition also reflects Kara’s questioning of fixed identity. She has described how attempts to stabilize herself through identity, particularly through building an archive in relation to her Kurdish background, ultimately bound her to structures of history, tradition, and gender which in turn revealed themselves as another form of conditioning. The new works emerge from this shift: they no longer seek to stabilize identity, but move away from it, allowing personal history to remain present without becoming definitive. Kara welcomes the fear of being “nothing” without identity, allowing it to open onto a presence that is not tied to origin or role. Her approach to abstraction thus becomes a form of epistemic refusal—an insistence on spaces where meaning can remain fluid rather than fixed. The paintings in Everything Knows invite viewers into this suspension, offering not a singular message but an unfolding experience of perception.
Underlying the exhibition is a quiet yet potent form of engagement. Rather than responding to oppression solely through anger or opposition, Kara speaks of cultivating inner peace and allowing it to radiate outward. This ethos permeates the work: while the surfaces may appear calm or intuitive, they are charged with the complexity of holding history without being bound by it.
A poetic undercurrent runs through the exhibition’s title. Everything Knows evokes a sense of a higher awareness—a core of being, a thread of the divine woven into the fabric of existence, becoming aware of itself. Kara’s paintings, with their fluid marks and unanchored forms, seem to reach toward this unnameable presence. They suggest that, in relinquishing fixed identities and narratives, one comes closer to an emergent, collective consciousness. In this way, the exhibition is less a fixed statement than a living process—one that invites contemplation of what lies beyond preconceived forms.
Melike Kara’s (b. 1985 Bensberg, Germany) expansive practice incorporates a wide variety of media, engaging with abstraction and materiality to explore openness and transformation. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at MO.CO. Montpellier; SCHIRN Kunsthalle Frankfurt; Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen; Kunsthalle Zürich; Kunstverein Düsseldorf; Museum De Fundatie, Zwolle; Philara Foundation, Düsseldorf; Frac des pays de la Loire, Nantes; Mead Gallery | Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry; Neue Galerie Gladbeck; Ludwig Forum Aachen; 58th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh; Kölnischer Kunstverein; Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels; Kunstverein Göttingen; Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam; Yuz Museum, Shanghai and Dortmunder Kunstverein. She will have a solo exhibition at Kunsthaus Hamburg in 2026. Kara lives and works in Cologne, Germany.