NURİ ABAÇ

NURİ ABAÇ (1926), eserleri Galeri Soyut arşivinde yer alan sanatçılardandır. Galeri Soyut sitesinde sanatçının 15 eseri ve 9 sergisi kayıtlı (eserlerin tarih aralığı 1972–1996). Sitedeki eserlerinde en çok görülen teknikler: Tuval üzeri yağlı boya. Eserleri hakkında bilgi ve fiyat için galeriye danışabilirsiniz.

Nuri Abaç was born in Istanbul in 1926. In 1944, he entered the Leopold Levy Workshop of the Painting Department at the State Academy of Fine Arts. He transferred to the Architecture Department a year later and graduated in 1950. In 1961, he settled in Ankara. He emerged with an original, decorative "surrealist" style reminiscent of embroidery-painting, which linked everyday life scenes with Anatolian legends and our traditional art forms. Developing a textural structure in the background of the painting that recalls his architectural training, Abaç intended to stage a multi-figured and crowded "humorous situation" on this infrastructure. He created warm and sympathetic presentations by appropriating the figuration, which we mostly encounter through the visuals offered by traditional Orta Oyunu and Karagöz, through character study. In Abaç's painting approach, which is based on an understanding of architectural structure, there are ironic references equivalent to nostalgia for the past, also containing social criticism. In his paintings prior to 1970, he depicted the legendary mythological creatures of Anatolian culture in a fairy-tale, surrealist-fantastic style. Later on, he addressed historical and current subjects and events in the personality and morphological resemblance of Karagöz. He focused on all imaginable unique details of the homeland, such as fishermen, simit vendors, marketplaces, taverns, weddings, and tea gardens. He was influenced by traditional forms of expression and the formal languages of cultural heritages, and reached the universal sensation of locality. He passed away in Ankara in 2008.

Addressing themes originating from Anatolia's cultural mosaic with a fantastic fiction and sense of humor, the artist developed a decorative, fantastic surreal expression in the 1950s. After settling in Ankara in 1960, he began to take an interest in Anatolia's cultural heritage and myths, creating his own unique world of imagery by examining the miniature and decorative arts of the Seljuk and Ottoman periods, as well as the pictorial elements of Karagöz. It is seen that he approached social issues with humor in his paintings such as "Karagöz’ün Gemisi", which he created based on Karagöz plays

His superficial approach, which is far from the depths of traditional Turkish painting and does not accommodate volumetric searches developing on two dimensions, manifests itself as a conscious avoidance of perspective in Nuri Abaç's paintings tied to the wit of Karagöz. The fact that the figure in Abaç's work envelops the picture surface with an embroidered sensibility does not imply a dependence entirely for decorative purposes. The handling of the figures or objects in the painting away from the concept of the third dimension does not mean that the values specific to paint are entirely excluded. While Nuri Abaç uses paint with a moderation that will create a sense of plane, he also creates light-dark and light-shade effects with the same moderation. When placing figures into space, he does not act according to the criteria of academic painting. The crescent form that usually limits the paintings from below leads us to the fact that the space in which the figures are located is an artificial space abstracted from nature.

The concept of objective proportion is also not valid for these paintings by Nuri Abaç: The space in which the figure is located has no natural relationship with it. For example, the sailboat shrinks while the figures grow; the figure's head is handled in a size that challenges the dimensions of a window. In faces shown entirely in profile, the eye is schematized to an unusual size. The head is shown to be half the size of the body. These figures are articulated like Karagöz and are constructed on the surface just like them. Compositions exhibit a concave and tectonic character where detail is accumulated. Just like in traditional shadow plays, all events give the impression of being designed on the screen. All these are proofs that we are faced with an illusion of nature rather than nature, and an illusion of figure rather than figure.

The paintings in which Nuri Abaç establishes an affinity with the flat and colored silhouette figures seen in traditional shadow play depictions are mostly works where he takes paddle steamers as a subject and evaluates them within his own unique understanding of form. Paintings belonging to this group establish close transitions between the primitive compositional characters of the figure and space connections in the "göstermelik" scenes—which are pinned onto the screen and held for a while with music before the play or "muhavere" begins in traditional Karagöz plays—and the accumulation understanding in Abaç's paintings where people travel merrily with instruments and songs on paddle steamers. Like Karagöz depictions, almost all of Nuri Abaç's paintings are built upon the cultural details of Istanbul life (we can also call these coastal cities). Thus, the fact that references are made to the traditional shadow play both formally and topically reveals that the locality in Abaç stems from traditional sources.