SURET-SİZ

1) …how happy he/she who on
the wings of a strong artistic
temperament can fly over the
hair-slender bridge to paradise
that lies between reality and
the abstract. Fikret Otyam,
conversation with Nuruallah Berk,
Varlık Magazine 1 February 1952,
no. 379 page 20
2) Atıf Yılmaz Batıbeki, who
joined the attic painters in 1947,
later began to direct films under
the name Atıf Yılmaz. Kezban
Arca was Batıbeki’s father.
Yılmaz’s 1979 film Adak (Votive
Offering) had Balkan Naci İslimyeli
as art director. The blood red of
such an offering, prior to the icons
in the untimely cycle of 2001, had
dominated the déjà vu cycle done
in 2000. Seen in the film Adak and
shown at great length, a number
of rituals are treated with variation
in the déjà vu cycle.
3) Published in Türk Resminde
Non-Figuratif Tartışmaları ve
Tavanarası Ressamları (Non-
Figurative Debates and the Attic
Artists in Turkish Painting), Zeynep
Yasa Yaman, Türkiye’de Sanat (Art
in Turkey), May/August 1993, p. 9,
pp. 60-63
The entrance of abstract art into Turkey dates back to
the 1950s when the country was trying to democratize.
Abstract painting was represented by the Democrat
Party’s administration, after six terms of having the Inönü
governments in power, and was dissenting. It sought
paths of freedom outside the academic and figurative
work supported, purchased and exhibited by the ruling
state and institutions representing the state in the periods
of a single party. Founded in 1933 as an attempt to do
without state backing and be independent, group d in its
explorations outside the center had, even then, begun
gradually to unite with that center, as a result of which a
group of artists calling themselves ‘Attic Painters’ (Nuri
İyem, Ferruh Maşağa, Fethi Karakaş and the other students
Atıfet Hançerlioğlu, Baha Çalt, Erdoğan Behrasavi, Ömer
Uluç, Seta Hidiş, Vildan Tatlıgil, Haluk Muratoğlu, Atıf Yılmaz
Batıbeki 2 and Ümit Mildon) in 1950 rented the laundry room
of a building on Asmalımescit Street and, following less
than a year of preparation, held their first exhibition at the
French Cultural Institute. At the same time the attic painters
were challenging group d, which was thought to represent
academism. The concepts of abstract and representational
art were heatedly debated during the first half of the 1950s. 3
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