Painter (B. 1915,
Istanbul – D. June 18th, 2005, Istanbul). His childhood passed by
travelling in many cities of Anatolia due to his father’s service who was a
health officer. He came to Istanbul after having finished primary school in
Mardin and he continued his secondary education, which he started in Vefa High
School, in Pertevniyal High School. In 1993, he entered the Istanbul Fine Arts
Academy, of which the current name is Mimar Sinan University, with the support
of Nazmi Ziya whom he was an admirer of his paintings.
He studied in the
workshops of Nazmi Ziya, İbrahim Çallı and Hikmet Onat and he took courses from
Leopold Levy. He graduated from the middle-level department of the academy in
1937 with sharing the first degree with Ragıp Gökcan. The artist, who entered
the high level department of the academy, which was opened in 1940, and
graduated from there four years later, founded the “Yeniler” Group with Kemal
Sönmezler, Turgut Atalay, Selim Turan, Avni Arbas, Mümtaz Yener whom he was
sharing his socialist-realist art approach. The movement lasted until 1951 by
the participation of Abidin Dino, Faruk Morel, Agop Arad, Yusuf Karaçay in the
group. Over time, there were breaks from the group. He made abstract
compositions in geometric style in his studies that he started to carry out
separately from the group after 1951. After 1966, he stood out with his
portraits, in which he reflected his unique artistic personality in a narrative
and figurative style. He worked as an
assistant of Halil Dikmen at the Museum of Painting and Sculpture for a while.
He opened his first
personal exhibition in a furnisher in 1946 in Beyoğlu. He applied wall paintings
in Ankara, Izmir and Istanbul. He tended towards abstract painting in the 1950s.
The artist, who had his signature on nearly six thousand paintings during his seventy
two years of art life, was especially known with his sorrowful Anatolian women
paintings. His art was apart from the academic centric approaches. He used the
ecoles and streams that were assumed as opposites in combination in his art.
Nuri İyem, whose nearly four thousands of works are in the hands of official
collectors, was known by reflecting his landscape and portrait works, love of
nature and longing for nature. He received the Painting Awards of the 50th
Year of the Republic in 1973, the Sedat Simavi Visual Arts Award in 1989 and the
TÜYAP Istanbul Art Fair Honor Award in 1997. He was buried in the Zincirlikuyu
Cemetery after his death. He was married and had two children.
“The painting of Nuri İyem is a kind of painting style that has been
improved by having greatly transformed during its long history of more than 70
years.
“While he addressed the abstract and figurative paintings as a style
issue being in mutually exclusive contrast in the beginning, he tended towards
a painting style which was aware of the artificiality of this contrast in the
last years. İyem has been increasingly painting a thought tradition that
integrates these two styles and going towards a synthesis where the figure
overlaps with the abstract.
“İyem integrates the symbolic one with the representative one, the
figure with the concept: He makes one comprehend the abstract and tangible
indirectly at the same time.” (Hilmi Yavuz)
