Şükriye Dikmen, 1907-2000

Şükriye Dikmen was born in İstanbul in 1907. After attending the American School for Girls as a boarder, she enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in 1940, encouraged by the painter Feyhaman Duran. While there, she worked in the studios of such artists as Nurullah Berk, Cemal Tollu, and Zeki Kocamemi. When she graduated in 1948, she went to Paris, where she continued her work under Fernand Leger. She studied art history at the Paris École Louvre for three years. Dikmen interlaces a distinct elegance and simplicity in each of her paintings, which she creates through the harmony of composition, design, and color. Throughout her artistic career, Dikmen mostly worked as a portrait painter, attaching great importance to fi gurative heads. The simplified style she developed during her Paris period became the basis for her future works. This simplicity is indeed the defining feature of her works.

Dikmen’s portraits tend to be focused on simplified forms and fields of pure color. They acquire individuality and come alive through figures, generally women. Dikmen’s works are imbued with a childlike innocence that comes from a minimal use of line, strong and gripping colors, and wood rather than canvas as the preferred medium. These elements are skillfully deployed in the creation of refined portraits whose huge eyes are reminiscent of Byzantine icons and which are psychologically revealing of their subjects. Her portraits reflect a desire on the part of the artist to fuse the lack of perspective in traditional miniature painting with the problems of Late Cubist modernism that she explored in Paris in the 1950s as a student of Fernand Léger and others.