Rezzan Has Museum hosts painter of light, Ziya Güran

ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News

The Rezzan Has Museum will host a retrospective exhibition of Nazmi Ziya Güran. The exhibition, opening Feb. 18, will reveal old works of Güran, a Turkish impressionist painter known as the “painter of light.”

The exhibition, which commemorates the 75th anniversary of the painter’s death, will continue until April 17. The show will include 75 of Güran’s paintings.

He was born in the Horhor neighborhood of Istanbul in the Ottoman Empire. He graduated in 1901 from the School of Political Science, where he had enrolled due to his father’s opposition to his ambition to be an artist. Upon the death of his father the same year, he entered the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied with Warnia and Valeri.

Preferring to paint from nature, Nazmi Ziya Güran rebelled against the rules of academic art. The visit of French post-impressionist painter Paul Signac to Istanbul in 1905 provided him with fresh inspiration. His teacher Warnia disapproved of the direction his painting was taking, and Güran was denied a diploma in 1907, although he did receive it the following year.

He went to Paris, studying briefly at the Académie Julian and also with Fernand Cormon, with whom Toulouse-Lautrec had studied years earlier.