Mübin Orhon Click for Artist Information

Mübin Orhon

MÜBİN ORHON (1924 - 1981)

Born in Istanbul in 1924, Mübin Orhon graduated from Ankara Faculty of Political Sciences in 1947. The artist, who went to Paris in 1948 to do his doctorate in economics, turned to painting under the influence of the lively art scene of this city. Mübin Orhon, who took pattern lessons at the Academie de la Grande Chaumière for a while, entered the art world with the geometric abstract paintings he painted. He developed close friendships with artists from Turkey living in Paris, such as Abidin Dino, Selim Turan, Avni Arbaş, Albert Bitran. In 1953 and 1955, one of his works was accepted to the Salon des Realites Nouvelles. After the mid-50s, he turned to a painting approach in which spotty elements came to the fore instead of a geometric abstract style. Towards the end of the 50s, he started working with Lucien Durand. It was during these years that Sir Robert and Lady Lisa Sainsbury met Mübin painting.

Mübin Orhon's geometric abstraction is balanced with a lyricism that is part of the period in which he lives. His paintings, which are considered a strange Eastern lyricism, are owned by Sam Francis. As seen in Vieira da Silva and Riopelle, it is the expression of a lyrical space divided into flows and indicators that bring to mind his Istanbul memories, for an abstract landscapeism that spreads to the general with the frequent use of stain. After his period in Turkey, where he returned to do his military service in 1965, his mature art evolved towards a "color-field" that would bring him closer to Mark Rothko and Lucio Fontana. The text regresses, turns into scrapes and notches, this is the last intervention before being buried in color. Thus, it is wrong to call the final process Monochrome, because the color is rendered with a luminous saturation. Fragile, rectangular shapes enter the picture space. On the one hand, a closed view, on the other hand, a space that invites us to dive into colorful saturation for a presence-absence. Orhon questions transparent and non-transparent layers in their simultaneity. His paintings show the light of work, the light of the mystery of life. The artist, whose paintings hold a unique place among the examples of works based on abstractist form research in our contemporary painting art following the 1960s generation, died in Paris in 1981.