Neş’e Erdok, 1940

After graduating from Neşet Günal’s studio at the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts painting department, Neş’e Erdok studied the language, literature, history, civilization, and art history of Spain at the Escuela Eutral de Idiomas and the Escuela Diplomática in Madrid.

Since the 1970s, Erdok has adopted a realistic approach to the figure in her paintings, exploring issues of identity, class, and gender in highly urbanized environments. Her strong powers of observation are displayed in works that combine the daily human condition with the infinitely diverse forms of imagery and representation possible in the discipline of painting. Her subject is her own body, but she also draws on her memory and visual archive. By portraying people, she has seen in her everyday life, she creates scenes on canvas that are in concrete and realistic dialogue with quotidian living.

In “Paper, Mister?” we see a young boy draped in a coat that is far too big for him. It seems to offer very little in the way of protection against the crowded world within which he is struggling to exist. His own attire, which tells the viewer that he is a newcomer to city life, contrasts sharply with the clothes and lifestyles of the people around him. To his right is a woman whose face is concealed, unlike those of the other three figures. She is carrying an infant in her arm while a young daughter clings anxiously to her leg. Like the boy, they are also poor; but unlike them, there is no one the boy can depend on for help. Erdok seems to want us to understand that the boy’s entreaty is more than an attempt to just sell a newspaper: it is an existentialist cry declaring that he too is a part of the tangle of city life. This work is intimately connected with the social mobility in Turkey when it was first exhibited in 1985, at a time when a majority of the country’s population were becoming city-dwellers for the first time. The leaden tones of the ground underscore the somber winter atmosphere of the painting, while the bare lower leg and foot in the upper left-hand corner inspires feelings of detachment, nakedness, death, and fate.