At our 557th Art Gathering, we are visiting Casa Botter to get to know artist İhsan Cemal Karaburçak better.
Born in Istanbul in 1898, Karaburçak is one of the rare Turkish painters who built his own artistic language without formal art training. Following a bureaucratic career that spanned from inspector at the PTT (Turkish Post and Telegraph Office) to Director of Telegraph Affairs, he joined the Anatolian News Agency in 1933. Although he first picked up a brush in 1930 at the Ecole Universelle in Paris, he was forced to leave the school shortly afterward. He held his first exhibition in Ankara in 1949, managed the Karaburçak Art Gallery in Ankara between 1956 and 1965, was a member of the Siyah Kalem Group, served as president of the Turkish Plastic Artists Association, and was a member of the Society of Art Critics and the Society of Contemporary Painters. He participated in the Venice Biennale in 1962, won the second prize at the State Painting and Sculpture Exhibition in 1968, and passed away on June 10, 1970.
The artist, who prioritized two-dimensionality in his paintings, avoiding directional elements such as front-back and up-down, organic hierarchy, and narrative, developed a unique expression using ideograms. Initially focusing on Ankara landscapes, Karaburçak gradually produced portraits, still lifes, nature scenes, cityscapes, nightscapes, and abstract paintings. His practice of observation – journeys along telegraph lines, geographies he encountered through his journalistic work – transforms into overlapping layers of time in his works. These layers evolve into a coded visual language reminiscent of Morse code and a dense arrangement reminiscent of miniatures. The purple tones are almost his signature: creating an atmosphere suspended between night and day, reality and memory.
The exhibition at Casa Botter consists entirely of works from the Karaburçak Family collection. Focusing on the artist's unique color language and production practice, the selection invites the viewer to reconsider the relationship between personal and collective memory. This exhibition offers the opportunity to read Karaburçak's work, which has been referred to for years as one of the "masters waiting to be discovered," as a holistic visual memory.
Wednesday, May 20
12:00-13:00
Address: Casa Botter, Şahkulu, İstiklal Caddesi No:235, Beyoğlu
https://maps.app.goo.gl/ancoagY34bui2iGa9?g_st=ic
