İbrahim Safi Click for Artist Information

İbrahim Safi

İBRAHİM SAFİ (1898 - 1983)

Safi was born in 1898 in Nakhchivan. He started to study in Moscow Fine Arts Academy but had to quit before graduating because of The Russian Revolution. He moved to Istanbul from Caucasia in 1918 and enrolled in “Sanayi– i Nefise Mektebi (today known as Mimar Sinan Fine Arts Academy), started to study in Namık İsmail atelier and has graduated in 1923. He carried on with his studies with a fellow immigrant artist called Naci Kalmukoğlu and created numerous artworks with an unique style, covered with traces of Russian Art’s particular impressionism and perception of realism. In Safi’s compositions, a successfully implied, figurative idealistic impressionist style is capturing the viewer’s eyes, as well as a sense of the combination of story telling and classicism in the structure, on a contextual level. In this unique approach we can almost sense that, even though Safi is aspired by Istanbul; he had a much different urban observation than Istanbul, as if those cities are almost anonyms. This unusual and structure based style is the inevitable result of the portrayal’s nearly spontaneous process. Especially figurative elements that are being approached with an illustrative sensibility and Safi’s unusual usage of the color white that is almost seen in every steps of painting make Safi’s paintings seem different and older even comparing to his contemporaries. Safi passed away in 1983, in Istanbul.