Avni Arbaş Click for Artist Information

Avni Arbaş

AVNİ ARBAŞ (1919 - 2013)

He was born in Istanbul in 1919. He worked at the Leopold Levy Workshop in the Painting Department of the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts (now known as Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University). He went to Paris in 1946 and lived there until 1976. During his first years in Paris, Arbaş continued to produce paintings with a "socialist-realistic" perspective, depicting Anatolian life and people, which started in Istanbul. However, towards the 1960s, he also came to the fore with his landscape experiments and object arrangements, which made the tendency towards abstraction a fundamental painting problem. In fact, it cannot be said that the artistic perception models of the period and the widespread shaping approaches attracted Arbaş's attention very much. He is an artist who has preserved his agenda and importance as an independent painting artist who maintains a measured expressive approach connected to nature and life. With a general definition; It has an approach that problematizes the formal requirements of the painting, its surface and texture characteristics, and therefore the inner plastic of the painting, and attaches importance to an aesthetic presentation. The gloomy atmosphere created with dark color tones privileges Arbaş's unique humor and ironic interpretation, with warm color effects surrounding the (rough) formal accents reflected on the figure. The shocking epic effect has always derived from this totality, this will to synthesis.

His works are exhibited in various overseas museums and institutions such as the Picasso Museum in Antibes and the Amman Fine Arts Gallery. His works are in various museums and private collections in Turkey as well as abroad. The artist passed away in 2003.