26.08.1940–present
Neşe Erdok
Neşe Erdok was born in 1940 in Üsküdar, Istanbul. She studied at the Istanbul academy of fine arts under Neşet Günal and then for five years in Paris, where her first solo exhibition took place in 1972. She taught at the academy for many years and has been a professor since 1981. She is known for figurative painting with distorted figures, large hands and feet. Her works are in Istanbul museums and the Norton Simon Museum.
Biography
Neşe Erdok’s first solo exhibition opened in 1972 at the Maison des Beaux-Arts in Paris, as she was finishing her studies in France.
She was born on 26 August 1940 in the Üsküdar district of Istanbul. Her family came from Skopje. Her father was a military officer, so they moved from place to place, and she had to change schools several times: in Üsküdar, Ankara and Erzincan. She spent one year studying in Germany. She then entered the State Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul and graduated from the studio of Neşet Günal, who had a strong influence on her. In 1965–1966 she studied in Madrid, taking courses in the Spanish language, literature, civilisation and art history. She was already exhibiting by then: in 1964–1966 her work was shown at the state painting and sculpture exhibitions in Ankara, and in 1965 at the Paris Biennale. After Madrid, the Ministry of National Education sent her to France to be trained as a future teacher at the academy. From 1967 to 1972 she worked in Paris, at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, under Professor Chaplain-Midy and Professor Pierre Matthey de l’Étang. In 1969 she took part in an exhibition of Chaplain-Midy’s studio at the Studio 28 cinema, and in 1970 in a show at the Galerie d’Orly at Paris airport.
On her return she began teaching at the same academy. In 1974 her first solo exhibition in Istanbul was held in the Osman Hamdi Salon at the academy, in 1977 she received her doctorate, and in 1981 she was made a professor. In 1978 her works were included in an exhibition of contemporary Turkish painting shown in Moscow and Baku.
From the late 1970s she won prizes in competitions: in 1979 an award at the “New Trends” exhibition, in 1980 an honourable mention at the 14th DYO exhibition, and in 1981 the grand prize of the Vakko competition “Peace at Home, Peace in the World”. In 1986 the Sedat Simavi Foundation gave her its visual arts award, shared with Füreya Koral. Later came an honorary award at the 16th Artist Istanbul art fair (2006) and the Aydın Doğan Award (2017).
The human figure is the main subject of her painting. Her figures are deliberately distorted, with disproportionately large hands and feet. I would not undertake to describe her manner more precisely from reference accounts alone, so this is something to check against the paintings themselves.
Her solo exhibitions have followed almost every year: in the Istanbul galleries Baraz, Maçka, Vakko, Urart, Lebriz and Evin, and in Ankara, Adana, İzmir and Mersin. In 1994 she was shown in the galleries of Yapı Kredi bank in three cities. In 2015 the Evin gallery held the exhibition “1953–2014 Drawings”. She has taken part in more than a hundred group exhibitions, among them one at the Odesa Art Museum (1995) and one in Mulhouse, France (1992). Her paintings are in the Istanbul State Museum of Painting and Sculpture at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, in the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art and in the Norton Simon Museum.
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