NURI İYEM - LANDSCAPE

Nuri İyem, one of the important names in our country's art history, adopted an independent and original pictorial understanding that belonged to the lands he lived in. Since his years of education, he earned his living only by painting. He tried to produce paintings that the society could relate to. He generally produced oil paintings on canvas or hardboard. In his paintings, he prioritized plastic elements such as form, color, light, composition, and balance before the subject, and created different textures in his paintings by developing original techniques.

Although he is particularly known for his portraits of women, he also produced abstract and abstraction paintings in addition to landscape, still life, and interior paintings. He depicted the people who were the source of his figurative paintings within their own social realities. As a witness of the society and era in which he lived, he reflected the images that affected him in his paintings with an original style. The subjects frequently found in his paintings include Anatolian people, women, images, eyes, ordinary loves, migration from rural to urban areas, workers, houses, shantytowns, Göreme and Şile landscapes, nudes, landscapes and object abstractions.

Nuri İyem was born in Istanbul in 1915. After his education in Albania and Istanbul, he went to Mardin with his mother in 1925 to live with his father. He finished primary school there. He started Istanbul Fatih Gelenbevi Secondary School in 1929. He continued his education first at Pertevniyal High School and then at Vefa High School in 1932. He worked in the studios of Nazmi Ziya, Hikmet Onat, İbrahim Çallı and Léopold Lévy between 1933 and 1937 and graduated from the Painting Department of the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts with first place. In 1939, he went to Giresun to teach secondary school art. In 1940, he re-entered the State Academy of Fine Arts to continue his education in the newly opened Advanced Painting Department under the direction of Léopold Lévy.

Nuri İyem graduated from the Department of Advanced Painting in 1944 by winning first place with his painting called Nalbant. His first solo exhibition was held on the third floor of a store in Beyoğlu in 1946. In 1986, a retrospective exhibition was held in honor of his 50th year of art at the TÜYAP Fair Center and a book was published as part of the exhibition. He received the 50th Year of the Republic Painting Award in 1973, the Sedat Simavi Visual Arts Award in 1989 and the TÜYAP Istanbul Art Fair Honorary Award in 1997. He made paintings influenced by Şile, where he and his wife Nasip İyem had summer studios. In 2001, Evin Art Gallery recorded and certified the artist's works within the scope of the Nuri İyem Paintings Archive and Documentation Project. As a continuation of the project, the Nuri İyem retrospective exhibition From Yesterday to Tomorrow consisting of 1504 paintings was opened at TÜYAP and a two-volume book containing visuals and information about all the archived works was published. İyem's works are in important collections such as the İstanbul and Ankara Painting and Sculpture Museums, İş Bankası Painting and Sculpture Museum, İstanbul Modern, and Odun Pazarı Modern Museum. His works continue to be exhibited and certified at Evin Art Gallery, where he worked from 1996 until his death in 2005. In addition, the gallery has been organizing the Nuri İyem Painting Award every year since 2006 to keep the artist's memory alive and to support young Turkish painters.