Colour of the breeze

item details

NameColour of the breeze

ProductionErol Akyavas; artist

Classificationoil paintings

Materialsoil paint

DimensionsImage: 1740 (height), 1205 (length)

Registration Number1974-0010-5

Credit lineGift of Frank H. Canaday, USA, 1974

Overview

Erol Akyavas (1932-1999) was born in Ankara, Turkey. He studied at the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts from 1950-52, and the Florence Academy of Fine Arts in 1952. After working in André Lhote and Fernand Léger’s studios in Paris, where he painted in a cubist style, Akyavas moved to Chicago in 1954 to study architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology. From the mid 1950s, while living in the US, he produced paintings that drew on both modernist abstract forms and Islamic art histories. Many of his works evoke Arabic calligraphic and ornamental traditions.

Akyavas' work is held in museum collections in Turkey, the United States (including the MoMA), Britain and Germany. During his lifetime he had numerous solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Europe, Russia and the Middle East. His work was included in the first and second International Istanbul Biennials, 1987 and 1989. He had a solo exhibition in 1988 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London. He died in Istanbul in 1999, and a retrospective exhibition was held at the Dolmabahçe Kültür Merkezi, Istanbul, in 2000. Another large retrospective was held at the Istanbul Modern in 2013.