Cevat Dereli Click for Artist Information

Cevat Dereli

Cevat Dereli (1900 - 1989)

He was born in Istanbul in 1900. He studied at Rüştüye and İdadi. With the guidance of Nazmi Ziya, he enrolled at Sanayi-i Nefise, where he became a student of Hikmet Onat and İbrahim Çallı. During his student years, he participated in group exhibitions of the Ottoman Painters Society. In 1922-23, he founded the New Painting Society with his friends. He went to Paris with a state scholarship in 1923 and worked in the Paul Albert Laurens Workshop at the Julian Academy until 1928. He joined the members of the Independent Group. He worked as an assistant teacher in the Nazmi Ziya Workshop at the Academy of Fine Arts. In the environment in which Turkish painting entered in the 1930s, Cevat Dereli, who adopted the cubist-constructivist view based on Cubism and resulting from the solidity of structure and line, adopted a poetic freedom with an increasingly relaxed tempo. He participated in the Venice Biennale in 1956 with a painting similar to the painting on "Production" he painted in 1954. An international committee gathered to select the paintings to participate in the 50-Year Modern Art Exhibition held in Brussels in 1958, found Cevat Dereli's paintings worth exhibiting among the works sent from Turkey. He gave paintings to Contemporary Turkish art exhibitions held abroad. He received the Sedat Simavi Foundation Visual Arts Award in 1977. He won one of the State awards at the exhibition organized by the Ministry of Culture in 1981.

The source of the artist's paintings is nature itself. Although the subject reflected in the picture is local, traditional, and ordinary that does not attract our attention in daily life, it gets rid of this ordinary and becomes poetic, like the sudden emergence of a part of our life that we have lived and left behind. Depth and superficiality are intertwined in his paintings. His paintings gradually acquire an unforced, light, soft and symbolic character, creating the effect of being unfinished or unfinished. Paintings of the artist, who made a series of paintings about the nature of Istanbul, the life of fishermen, and the "Yelloz" of Bağdat Street, are in the Istanbul and Ankara State Painting and Sculpture Museums, as well as in private collections at home and abroad. He died in Istanbul in 1989.