İş Sanat hosts Günal retrospective

ISTANBUL- Hürriyet Daily News

With his unique patterns, Neşet Günal is one of the greatest Turkish painters.

İş Sanat’s Kibele Art Gallery is hosting a retrospective of work by painter Neşet Günal, one of Turkey’s greatest champions of figurative drawing, for its first show of the 2012-2013 season. The show will feature portraits and patterns created between 1946 and 2001.

With his unique patterns, impeccable compositions and powerful expression, Günal is regarded as one of the greatest Turkish contemporary painters. Having tackled the problem of cultural identity from his earliest paintings, Günal also ranks among the rare masters that achieve universality through locality.

Spirit of Léopold Lévy
Günal first drew attention for his portraits. In this early period his passion was for putting what he saw on paper. His early paintings were close to the spirit of Léopold Lévy. His reductive sense of color brought to him use pattern as the main constituent element and color as an auxiliary. Lévy found Günal’s patterns very powerful. He lauded his work, and encouraged him, saying “at this age even Rafael drew this much.”

People of Anatolia
By the end of the 1950’s, the people of Anatolia had become the indispensible material of Günal’s paintings. Anatolia became Günal’s major artistic theme, as he depicted the increasing migration from village to town, and also brought the Anatolian village to the attention of the art world. Günal created works that revealed the “people of the soil” and Anatolia’s rough living conditions. He drew attention for his lyrical drawings of Anatolian people. The Anatolian reality Günal portrayed is interpreted as his statement on social contradictions.

Günal increased the dramatic effect of his paintings in the series “Kapı Önü,” “Duvar Dibi” and “Çocuklar,” which became his signature works of the 60s, 70s and 80s.