Burhan Uygur Click for Artist Information

Burhan Uygur

BURHAN UYGUR  (1940 - 1992) 

He was born in Giresun in 1940. He completed his primary education in Trabzon. He entered the painting department of Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts. In 1968, while he was still a student, he opened his first exhibition at Beyoğlu Art Gallery. He graduated from Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu workshop in 1969. He studied with Corneille at the Salzburg Summer Academy. In 1970, he was chosen first in the competition organized by the Society of Contemporary Painters and received the title of "Young Painter of the Year" and became one of the leading artists of his generation. He sold his "Notebook", which he never left with him for painting, to Erol Simavi, and with the money he bought the house where his family lived in Üsküdar. He received the Sedat Simavi Foundation Visual Arts Award in 1978 and the second prize of the Asia-European Biennial in 1982. Uygur, who was among the figurative tendencies of Turkish painting between 1960 and 1970, created a dreamy and poetic world by using abstract and figurative elements together. In his paintings, in which he makes little use of lines, the fetus-like figures he expresses with stains stand as if floating in space. The artist, who deals with continuity within the cycle of life-death-immortality, combined colorful types and scenes from daily life with his rich inner world in some of his paintings. Burhan Uygur was free to choose the subject. He says that everything that enters his inner world and affects him enters his painting: “I make no discrimination. Even a glass on a table with a flower next to it attracts me as much as a painting with a human figure in it, and takes me away. I suffer the same sweet pain and taste the same sweet pleasure in all of them. As long as I love it. “I use everything in daily life as the subject of my paintings.” He feeds on the streets of Istanbul, which he loves very much, and the Aegean coast and its people in the summer. It describes the people in those circles. His paintings, which integrate with his contextual structure and contain unique figures with a stigmatizing approach, have created a model that especially affects the young generation in terms of their search for original infrastructure in our contemporary art. Burhan Uygur's paintings are found mainly in museums and important private collections in Turkey. After suffering a brain hemorrhage in 1989, as soon as he regained consciousness, he asked for paint and paper with signs. This shows how important painting is to him and how indispensable it is in his life. Unfortunately, he died of a brain hemorrhage while driving in April 1992.