Book Description

The book of the exhibition at the Pera Museum (Nov 25, 2015–Feb 7, 2016)

Bare, Naked, Nude: A Story of Modernization in Turkish Painting focuses on the evolution of nude painting as one of the foremost genres alongside portraiture, landscape, and still life in Turkish modern art. The rich diversity of styles represented in the paintings that come together in this exhibition reveal that the nude, far from being a subject for Turkish artists constitutes a means of expression fundamental in the search for form. The most challenging trial for artists in their student years, the human body emerges as a central source of inspiration in both the pursuit for modernist tendencies in Western art and in the efforts to articulate an individual artistic language.

The exhibition catalogue, through the essay of the curator, Ahu Antmen and the selected paintings offer us the possibility to envisage the visual adventure behind Turkey’s story of modernization, providing an insight into the formation of artistic identity in the period extending from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic, the challenges of transforming the perception of the female body from a framework of privacy to that of a desexualized object and the connections between the art and the nude in the perception of a modern identity.