I began my art education in 1976 at the State Academy of Fine Arts. The Academy’s strong, drawing-based, theoretical and practical studio training introduced me to a broad understanding of art that stretches from the classics of Western art to modernism, from Cubism to non-objective and abstract art. This process formed the basis of the research I developed on form, colour, space, balance and composition.
In my early work I concentrated on geometric abstraction, collage and mixed media. Alongside form and colour, I investigated the relationships between void and solid, active and passive areas, light and shadow, rhythm and tonal value. This period, which brought together consciousness and intuition, analysis and synthesis, allowed the approach of “analysis + synthesis = personal synthesis” to develop, the approach that underlies my understanding of art.
From the 1980s onward I began to bring objective and figurative elements together with geometric abstract forms within the same composition. I treated figure and object not merely as descriptive elements but as pictorial values that form a relationship with the plastic structure of abstract space. In this way the relationship I built between figurative reality and abstract order became, over time, one of the defining features of my personal pictorial language.
In 1984 my work “Sunu” was awarded second prize in the İnönü Foundation Painting Competition, which became an important turning point in my artistic journey. The work was based on the synthesis of objective figurative elements and geometric abstract elements in a universal artistic language and a contemporary interpretation.
The Steel Series, which developed in the same years, was born from the reflections of light, fire, shadow and colour on metal surfaces. The changing surface of steel and the visual effects created by the fire of the rolling mill merged with geometric and figurative forms within black space and became a new pictorial structure. In the works that followed, “Ritm” (Rhythm) and “Figürlerin Dansı” (Dance of the Figures), the relationships of line, tone, movement, void and solid, and rhythm came to the fore.
Over time, my relationship with our own cultural sources became a defining quality in the development of my art. The linear and rhythmic structure of calligraphy entered my compositions first through abstract geometric forms, and then together with ebru (marbling), tezhip (illumination) and miniature. Addressing the aesthetic values of Classical Turkish Arts within the plastic language of contemporary painting formed a new phase of my personal synthesis.
In my 1993 work “Mühür” (Seal), inspired by a seal in the Sadberk Hanım Museum, I used calligraphic forms as an element of the composition. The training in Classical Turkish Arts that I received in the 2000s strengthened the technical and intellectual foundations of my relationship with calligraphy, ebru, tezhip and miniature.
Between 2003 and 2011, the historical and cultural heritage of Istanbul and museum collections became an increasingly distinct source in my work. Objects from the collections of Topkapı Palace and the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts, historical forms and examples of calligraphy were reinterpreted from their original contexts within abstract space and entered my compositions.
This period was followed by the Mevlevis – “Ya Hazreti Mevlana” series, which I made at the proposal of the General Directorate of Fine Arts. In my works “Ne Olursan Ol Yine Gel” (Come Again, Whoever You Are), “Mevleviler”, “Semazen” (The Whirling Dervish), “Mevlana” and “Aşk” (Love), cultural and historical references merged with abstract and figurative elements and reached new meanings within my personal pictorial language.
The elements of cultural heritage I selected from museum collections began to appear on my canvases over time, changing scale in abstract spaces, transforming into different forms and being reconstructed. Rather than transferring historical works one to one, I reworked them in a universal artistic language and a contemporary interpretation, starting from their aesthetic and cultural values. My works developed under the title “Geçmişin Mirası” (The Legacy of the Past) are the natural continuation of this long process of research, analysis and synthesis.
In my recent works I take the relationship between abstract space and real object into the third dimension. Alongside original examples of calligraphy, ebru, tezhip and miniature, antique objects, handmade tiles, traditional handicrafts, gold and natural stones merge with the pictorial surface. As some elements project forward from the plane of the canvas, a new visual relationship is established between the abstract and the concrete, past and present, tradition and contemporaneity.
In these works I treat the elements of cultural heritage not merely as elements that refer to the past, but as original plastic elements reinterpreted within the plastic language of contemporary painting. The relationships among abstract space, real object, geometric structure, colour, rhythm and space are reconstructed within a personal understanding of composition that reaches a whole.
What matters to me is less that the viewer resolve the work at a glance than that they reach the whole by forming the visual and intellectual relationships among the elements that make up the composition. In this way the work, without being bound to a single, fixed reading, gains new meaning in line with the viewer’s own sensitivity and experience.
In my work from the period after 1993 to the present, my aim has been to approach Turkish culture, Classical Turkish Arts and the values that make up the legacy of the past through a contemporary interpretation, starting from a universal artistic language, and to reach an original personal synthesis through analysis and synthesis.
For me, the legacy of the past is not a value that has remained in the past and must merely be preserved; it is a living source that establishes a new relationship with the present and continues to exist by transforming within the language of contemporary art. In my works, forms, objects and artistic values from the past are reinterpreted within today’s abstract space and plastic understanding. Thus the bond I build between past and present goes beyond a transfer and becomes a new visual and intellectual whole. Setting out from the traces of the past to reach the language of today, and carrying this heritage into the future through my personal synthesis, is the fundamental direction of my artistic journey.
Uğur Mine Tamay