Fikret Mualla Click for Artist Information

Fikret Mualla

FİKRET MUALLA (1903 - 1967)

He was born in Istanbul in 1903. He studied at Galatasaray High School. He spent a while in Switzerland, Germany and France to study engineering. In 1930, he changed his mind and returned to Turkey. He organized his first personal exhibition in Istanbul in 1934 and worked as an art teacher for a while. He settled in Paris in 1938. Instead of a regular education, Mualla left himself to the free formation of his instincts. Fikret Mualla, who lived a difficult but productive life in Paris, where he came as a result of a search, managed to attract attention by systematizing a new and original approach to painting in a very modest way - in the context of observations about daily life. Mualla, who breathes the bohemian atmosphere of bars and cafes, especially in the troubled atmosphere of the Second World War, is an important attitude that stands out with its level of expression, composition and color sensitivity within the figure tradition. The series he created with the gouache technique on paper, which is a suitable basis for rapid production, was quick to produce a solution that found its counterpart in the synthesis of Fauvism and Expressionism, integrating with the colorist sensitivity based on the Post-Impressionist heritage and partly on Henri Matisse. At this stage it is official; While determining according to the result of a spontaneous sensitivity's desire to observe and transform; He also tied the pursuit of painting to a problem of existence.

This Paris adventure, which essentially lies in exclusion and inability to hold on to one's own country, seems to have turned into a sad story that lasts until the end of one's life, in pursuit of a closed-circuit relationship that finds meaning only in producing paintings. Contrary to the extravagance and disorder in his life, his paintings reflect an artist's attitude that dominates the subject and style. Paris' entertainment venues, drinking halls, people walking on the streets, and cafes are displayed with colorful expressions in Fikret Mualla's large and small paintings. Fikret Mualla is the first Turkish artist who managed to open the doors of our contemporary art of painting to the Western world with his tragic life and depression and the original-personality structure of his painting and was able to make a name for himself in Western sources. Mualla, whose works are in various international museums and private collections, died in Paris in 1967.