Bedri Baykam, 1957

Bedri Baykam played a pioneering role in spreading the Neoexpressionist movement in Turkey after 1980. He studied art at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland between 1980 and 1983. He brings his personal stories and contemporary production practices to the fore, sometimes through a poetic, expressionistic style, and at other times by arranging the most ordinary objects as collages. Developing his own painting grammar, the artist employs a variety of expressive techniques, ranging from the abstract to the figurative and including installation and performance art.

Baykam created paintings and actions that contain political and social messages amidst the political apathy of the post-1980 art milieu. In his installations “The Box of Democracy” (1987), “Kubilay’s Room” (1987), and “The Bookburner” (1988) he highlighted his historical and social responsibilities as an artist. Starting in 1986, he created Photo-Paintings in which he combined photography and painting. The result of extensive and meticulous documentation, these paintings were exhibited in the shows “Inner Landscapes II” (1988), “May 27” (1990), and “Kuvay-ı Milliye” (1994). Drawing attention to the political dimension of art, he reveals the West’s appropriation of the history of modern art and its cultural imperialism over the Third World.

The work “Ingres, Gérôme, This is my Bath” is part of the installation Bedri Baykam created in 1987 for the 1st Istanbul Biennial. It was located in architect Mimar Sinan’s Haseki Sultan Bath. The installation, which appeals to the five senses and invites audience interaction, had water running down the bath wall and also featured music and scent. The left side of the work was adapted from Ingres’s “Turkish Bath”, the right side from Gérôme’s “Grand Bath at Bursa”, and Baykam secretly included himself in the painting. “Ingres, Gérôme, This is my Bath” may be interpreted as an insider’s answer or appeal to the way foreign painters, who couldn't enter a bath or harem, were captivated by them and imagined them in erotic terms, from an Orientalist point of view.