EROL AKYAVAŞ - THE VOICE OF THE OLD WALL

He graduated from the Architecture Department of the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts. He attended the Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu Studio as a guest student between 1950-52. He worked with Andre Lhote and Fernand Leger in Paris between 1952-53. He took classes at the Florence Academy during the summers. He participated in the 'Cercle et Carre' and 'Salon des Realites Nouvelles' exhibitions. He studied architecture at IIT Chicago with Mies Van Der Rohe in the USA between 1954-60. He made designs with Eero Saarinen between 1960-62. He was a finalist for the Ağahan award in the Cappadocia Hotel Architecture studies in 1964-65. He settled in New York in 1967. He was known for his abstract works that bore traces of calligraphy and miniature arts. He first turned to geometric abstraction and then to surrealist practices. Surrealist qualities became apparent in terms of spatial relations with the architectural education he received. In the 1970s, he was occasionally influenced by Turkish miniature art; he made paintings containing pyramids, coffins, locks, iron bars, symbols of torture and death. He applied different perspectives in these city paintings. In the 1980s, the influences of calligraphy began to be seen in his paintings. In his later periods, he combined calligraphy with traditional genres such as miniature and marbling to establish an abstract order. He held a retrospective exhibition at Istanbul Modern in 2013. Erol Akyavaş described what he wanted to do as writing modern poetry in the form of a ghazal while creating syntheses of dreams and reality, the seen and the unseen, with mysticism, which he was always interested in.