BALKAN NACİ İSLİMYELİ

A prominent figure of Turkish contemporary art, who has never ceased to seek new means of expression and pushed the limits of social values, Balkan Naci İslimyeli celebrates his 40th year with the restrospective exhibition “Air-Water-Earth-Fire and Istanbul” at İş Sanat’s Kibele Art Gallery. Inspired by Istanbul, the exhibition comprises five sections featuring 200 works including paintings, photographs, video works, prints, sculptures and installations.

Rightly scheduled for Istanbul’s status as the European Capital of Culture in 2010, the show will present a historical and ironic panorama of Istanbul and its inhabitants to its audience. The Istanbul shown here is quite different than what we’re used to seeing with the extraordinary liveliness caused by the melting and conflicting cultures, portraits and the struggle for existence where the city becomes a stage.
İslimyeli opened his first exhibition in 1970 while still a student and he dedicates this retrospective to Istanbul which he hails as “his greatest mentor”. This show is his gratitude towards Istanbul which he conceives as an art laboratory.

For İslimyeli, İstanbul is identical with “air, water, earth and fire”, an arena of existence and non-existence, life and death and he has produced these works out of respect, admiration and surprise. The exhibition will be accompanied by a book and a DVD.

Born in 1947, Balkan Naci İslimyeli graduated from the State Higher School for Applied Fine Arts with honors in 1972 and started to work as a research assistant in the same institution the following year. He studied litography in Salzburg under scholarship from the Austrian government. He completed his thesis on “Element of Narration in Visual Arts” in 1977 and continued his studies at the Florence Academy of Fine Arts between 1980–82 under the scholarship of Italian government and the following year completed his doctorate. Following his work on contemporary art in New York (1989), he went on to study at the NYU Faculty of Fine Arts with a Fulbright Scholarship.

He served as a guest artist at the Hartford Trinity College in USA upon invitation and was elevated to professor status in 1996.The time between 1996–2003 was an opportunity for him to work in different countries he was invited to. He published five art books titled Suç (Crime), Söz (The Word), Suret (Image), Déjà vu and Matah (Great Things) as well as writing poems and stories for magazines like Dost, Oluşum, Yazı, Gösteri, Argos, Kitaplık. Having worked as an art director for movies, İslimyeli served as an advisor for various cultural programs on TV. Having directed his own studio at the Marmara University and the painting studio at the Bilgi University, he lectured on Art and Design, Communication and Contemporary Art, Visual Analysis Methods, Experimental Art Studio, Visual Semiotics at the Maltepe University. He currently lectures at the Işık University Faculty of Fine Arts and resides in Istanbul.


Kibele Art Gallery
İş Kuleleri
Tel: (212) 316 15 80