Zekai Ormancı, 1949-2008

Zekai Ormancı was a student at the İstanbul State Academy of Fine Arts in 1968-1973 and graduated from the school’s painting department. After working abroad for a time he returned to Turkey and joined the academy as an instructor, a position that he held there for many years. It was Ormancı who set up the academy’s tapestry studio. He also created a 30 m² tapestry for the presidential mansion in Çankaya that took him nine months to weave.

In his paintings, Zekai Ormancı presents a structure that sets forms (which sometimes resemble mechanical parts or surreal objects and sometimes nothing at all) side by side or one atop the other in a seemingly empty void in an apparent endeavor to translate classical concerns with composition into a contemporary language. Occasionally one even comes across a figure in this artist’s work that suggests that it has been plucked from a work of fictional or cinematic fantasy. Figures and forms heaped up in an undefined emptiness provoke a sense of weightiness as they cavort with a mysterious light and coalesce with the artist’s conflicting, dominating, and even aggressive colors.