Tülay Tura Börtecene, 1936-2018

Born in 1936 in Istanbul, Tülay Tura Börtecene is a graduate of the Istanbul School for Girls. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in the studio of Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, graduating in 1959. Between 1961 and 1962 she worked in the painting and ceramics department at the University of Wisconsin. She formed the Blue Group in 1963 with Adnan Çoker, Devrim Erbil, Altan Gürman, and Sarkis.

The fundamental elements of a painting for Börtecene are colors and smudges. Remaining faithful to the essence of painting, she is not afraid to use all the oil painting techniques available. By doing this, she creates on her canvases a singular, unique world within a chaotic universe. Börtecene began her artistic career in the 1960s as a practitioner of abstract art, current in the period. In the politically charged 1980s, following the coup, she began producing figurative paintings with critical social content. She returned in the 1990s to abstract expressionist paintings, which contained the romanticism and seductiveness that had been a part of her work from the beginning. Traces of her late period abstract paintings, with their clash of movement and color, can be seen in her early works as well.

Works from Börtecene’s “Micro-Organic Worlds” series point to a break in her transition from the abstract to the figurative. Her kinetic and abstract lines are replaced by deliberate lines and a gradual substantiveness emerges. While these figures are familiar, they do not belong to the world we know, so they still occupy an abstract field. With their organic structures, these undefined images resemble creatures below the sea, imperceptible micro-organisms, or formations from the earliest stages of life.