Selma Gürbüz

Biography

Selma Gürbüz's first solo exhibition opened in Istanbul in 1986, when she was about twenty-six. By then she already had an English college and a degree from an Istanbul university behind her.

She was born in Istanbul in 1960. In 1978 she went to England, to Exeter College of Art and Design, where she studied painting, photography and theatre. From 1980 to 1982 she returned to the same college, this time for painting and sculpture. In 1984 she graduated from the Department of Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Marmara University. After that the exhibitions came one after another, and their geography is wide. Solo shows were held in Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir, in Paris (at Galerie Thorigny and Galerie Maeght), in Prague, Houston, Tokyo, Dubai and London. In 1997 the exhibition “Mundus Elementaris” travelled to branches of the Alliance Française in Argentina: Buenos Aires, Mendoza, Córdoba, Bahía Blanca, Rosario, Santa Fe and Mar del Plata. In 1995 her work was shown at the Gwangju Biennale. In 2006 the exhibition “Go East”, with artists from Turkey, Italy and Japan, was held in Beijing, and in 2007 she worked as an invited artist at a residency in Kamiyama, Japan. In 2011 “Shadows of My Self” was shown in London, at Leighton House; Rose Issa, the organiser of the exhibition, also published a book of the same title.

The titles of her Istanbul exhibitions speak for themselves: “Cin ile Peri” (“The Jinn and the Fairy”, 2004), “Tüylü Masallar” (“Feathered Tales”, 1999), “Gece Minyatürü” (“Night Miniature”, 2009). By her own account, her paintings were dominated by nature, animals and creatures that she described as ghosts of nature. They were linked to the myths and fairy tales she had read, and to her imagination. She said she did not separate them from the living creatures of nature: for her they were part of it. I would carefully suggest that this is why her animals do not look like illustrations to a fairy tale.

Besides painting she worked in sculpture, weaving and engraving. She was artistic director of two films by the director Ömer Kavur: “Akrebin Yolculuğu” (“The Scorpion's Journey”, 1997) and “Karşılaşma” (“The Encounter”, 2002). She worked mostly in her studio in Istanbul.

Her work is held by the British Museum, the Fondation Maeght in Paris, SantralIstanbul, İstanbul Modern, Proje 4L, Bilgi University in Istanbul and the State Art and Sculpture Museum in Ankara. In 2013 the writer Ferit Edgü published a book about her, “Three Writings for Selma Gürbüz”.

Her last solo exhibition, “Dünya Diye Bir Yer”, was held at İstanbul Modern; the museum published her monograph of the same title to accompany it. The exhibition was still running when Gürbüz died in Istanbul on 22 April 2021.