Painter and Painting

A Mehmet Güleryüz Retrospective

"Painter and Painting: A Mehmet Güleryüz Retrospective" presented an inventory of Güleryüz’s oeuvre from the 1960s to the 2010s shedding light on the development and transformation of the artist’s generous quest for expression, which ranges from painting, drawing, sculpture, and engraving to theater and performance.

With his critical and expressionist style, Mehmet Güleryüz has earned himself a privileged place in the Turkish art scene. His art centers on people and the sociopolitical conditions surrounding them. Born in 1938, Güleryüz uses a critical and ironic language to express, through his figurative works, the effects of Turkey’s sociocultural and political transformation on people. Love of family, male-female relationships, nature and living beings, and all the processes that influence oral and visual culture are manifested in his paintings as human acts. Güleryüz produces art through an approach that invites its viewers to take a stance.

Güleryüz studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts in the 1960s and made a mark in the Paris art environment in the 1970s with his happenings. 1980s onwards, playing an active part in the transformation of the art scene in Turkey, Güleryüz’s art showed an unusual development, manifesting how an artist can generate his individual style. As an active theater actor, the intimate connection he has established between theater and the visual arts is one of the most interesting examples of his interdisciplinary approach.

Focusing on everyday perceptions, familiar and established feelings, his work references the history of its own time. According to the artist who has a unique character and style in terms of drawing and line, drawing is an artistic language in its own right. Working on the reflections of his drawings and paintings in the physical world, Güleryüz has produced important research and examples of sculpture since 1970’s. Based on the human being’s relationship with sculpture, he has followed the traces of his figures in the three-dimensional world.

Presented in chronological order, the exhibition at Istanbul Modern is enriched by texts penned by the painter trying to understand his inner world. The exhibition featured close to 150 works and approximately 300 drawings animated in multimedia presentations, as well as a rich biographical wall display which brings together all of the artist’s periods, life story, various experiences he has been through and texts about him.

Mehmet Güleryüz has also produced countless works on the reflections of his drawings and paintings in the physical, three-dimensional world. Since the 1970s, he has produced important research on and examples of sculpture. Based on the human being’s relationship with sculpture, he has followed the traces of his figures in the three-dimensional world.

The exhibition brings together the works the artist has produced since the 1960s in fields such as drawing, painting, sculpture, engraving, painted porcelain, and performances. Presented in chronological order, the exhibition is enriched by texts penned by a painter trying to understand his own inner world. The exhibition features close to 150 works, which render visible the passionate and profound bond between the painter and painting, and approximately 300 drawings animated in multimedia presentations, as well as a rich biographical wall display which brings together all of the artist’s periods, life story, various experiences he has been through and texts about him, thus rendering visible a personal story of the art scene in Turkey from the 1960s to the present.

Curator: Levent Çalıkoğlu

Assistant Curator: Senem R. Kantarcı