Some artists cannot be described by a single work, period or particular style. Özdemir Altan was one of them.
After 95 years of life, he leaves behind not only an extraordinary body of work, but also an approach to art that influenced how generations of artists in Türkiye thought about their practice. Throughout a career spanning more than seven decades, he questioned what painting could be, what an artwork could contain and, perhaps most importantly, whether art should ever settle for a single answer.
My own path crossed with Özdemir Altan’s in 2022, when I curated his "Soyağaçları" ("Family Trees") exhibition at Galeri Baraz. The exhibition brought together works from Altan’s long-running Soyağaçları series. It was also a particularly meaningful return for the gallery: Altan had held his first solo exhibition there in 1984, and nearly four decades later, his second solo exhibition brought him back to the same space.
Looking back at that exhibition today, what stays with me is less a single series than the remarkable continuity of Altan’s curiosity throughout his life.
Because Özdemir Altan did not simply make paintings.
He constantly tested the boundaries of painting.
In fact, he had been doing so for almost as long as he could remember. In an interview, when speaking about his relationship with painting, he said simply, “I have been painting for as long as I can remember.” He spoke of painting from childhood, of being known as “the painter” at school, and of cutting reproductions of artists such as Van Gogh, Cezanne and Gauguin from magazines and collecting them in notebooks. Painting was not a profession he chose later in life. It was something that had been with him from the very beginning.
Born in 1931, Altan graduated from the Painting Department of the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts in 1956. He was first a student of Halil Dikmen and later of Zeki Faik Izer. In 1962, he returned to the institution as an assistant and taught there for many years. He played a role in educating hundreds of artists while simultaneously contributing directly to the transformation of Türkiye’s artistic environment.
His artistic career never followed a linear path.
"Romantik Dönem" ("Romantic Period"), followed by "Krallar ve Kraliçeler" ("Kings and Queens"), "Tepegöz ve Sinek Kralının Oğlu" ("Cyclops and the Son of the Fly King"), "12 Mart ve Sonrası" ("March 12 and After"), "Gerçekçi Dönem" ("Realistic Period"), "Kolaj ve Üçboyutlular" ("Collages and Three-Dimensional Works"), "Çok Kişiyle Pano Çalışmaları" ("Multi-Person Panel Works") and, from 1989 onward, "Soyağaçları" ("Family Trees"). After 2004 came what he described as his "Yeni Dönem" ("New Period").
Each new period seemed less like a continuation of the previous one than a new possibility that questioned it.
This restlessness was one of the defining characteristics of Altan’s art.
He was one of the first artists to carry avant-garde thinking and pop art into Turkish painting, but to consider him simply as a representative of a particular movement would be to minimize his work considerably. His deeper concern was how art is constructed and what can happen when fundamentally different concepts, ideas and structures come together.
This is where the concept of “espas,” a term central to Altan’s thinking throughout his life, becomes essential.
For Altan, espas was not simply empty space. It encompassed depth, void and space itself. It was the fundamental field in which the artwork actually came into being. For him, we did not make a painting merely on the surface of the canvas; we made it within the space of the canvas, within the espas.
This idea was at the center of his understanding of art.
Altan saw one of the reasons Turkish painting had remained attached to the surface for so long in its tendency to reconcile different elements, to harmonize them and to make them “fit” one another. He argued for the opposite. He believed that art was formed by different concepts and different logics and that the incompatibility of these differences could itself form a whole.
In his words, art was not a harmony but “an adventure of incompatibilities.”
That sentence is perhaps one of the best keys to understanding Altan’s art.
For him, the unity of an artwork did not have to come from everything within it resembling or complementing everything else. On the contrary, the more pronounced the differences between its elements became, the more interesting the relationship within the espas could become.
The thinking he had developed in his work since 1984 eventually led, in 1988, toward what he described as “Rastlantısal Buluşma” ("Random Confluence").
This was not simply about using chance as an artistic gesture. Altan was investigating the role of chance in the formation of art itself.
In his first application, artworks and objects independently produced by several students were brought together on a surface he had prepared. Altan and the young artists were meeting, almost randomly, within the espas of a single surface.
The same year, his Dog Walking Areas Integration Project took this idea further. Pieces of a large surface were distributed among different people – artists, amateurs and children were invited to work freely on their individual pieces. Altan then mounted these pieces onto the larger surface according to their numbers, rather than constructing a predetermined aesthetic composition.
During the first stage, he realised that his own instinct to intervene was still taking over. He was adding accents and contours to certain areas of the work. In later applications, however, he stopped doing so and refrained from intervening in either the work of the other artists or the surface he had prepared.
Because this was precisely what he was investigating: Did all the elements of an artwork really need to be harmonious in advance for the work to become a whole?
Altan’s conclusion rested on the importance of chance. When elements that were as foreign to one another as possible were brought together, the relationship between them could emerge not from a predetermined design but from a random encounter.
Here, the concept of espas once again became central.
In Altan’s thinking, art was formed by different logics and concepts. All art existed within an espas, and at the foundation of that espas was the coexistence of differences. When the distance between different structures was pushed to an extreme, the conscious relationship between them approached zero, leaving chance behind.
Therefore, the wholeness of art did not depend on every individual detail being inherently valuable or “beautiful.”
This was one of the most radical aspects of his artistic inquiry over the decades.
What made Altan’s work important was not only the results he produced, but his constant willingness to question the methods through which he arrived at those results.
When asked whether he knew in advance what his next style would be, his answer was remarkably direct: “I have no idea.”
He did not know that he would move into three-dimensional works in the 1980s. He did not know that he would develop a formula such as Tepegöz ve Sinek Kralının Oğlu (Cyclops and the Son of the Fly King). These things emerged
through the process of working. He described how, as he continued to work, his habits began to shift and something new would, in a sense, simply appear before him.
This reveals one of Altan’s most distinctive qualities as an artist: his willingness to move away from himself rather than repeat himself.
Instead of safely continuing a style that had already earned him recognition, he chose to explore another possibility each time.
And he did so without ever disconnecting from art history.
Quite the opposite. He knew it deeply. He spoke with genuine admiration about the great masters of European art, from Uccello to Rembrandt and from classical painting to the Baroque. His radicalism did not come from rejecting the past. It came from refusing to remain confined within it.
This is also why it would be incomplete to define Özdemir Altan simply as a painter.
He was also a teacher, writer and exhibition-maker who organized exhibitions at a time when curatorial practice in Türkiye had not yet taken on the meaning it has today. In 1968, he organized an exhibition devoted to Hüseyin Avni Lifij, followed by exhibitions of artists including Zeki Faik İzer, Mahmut Cûda and Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, as well as numerous young artists. He wrote about art, gave lectures and conferences and directly contributed to the development of the artistic environment through his work with students.
His influence therefore extended far beyond the works that came out of his own studio.
He also contributed to creating the environment in which art could happen.
Perhaps this is why Özdemir Altan’s legacy cannot be measured only by the works he left behind. His influence continues through the artists he educated, the conversations he opened, the exhibitions he organised and the questions he raised about how art could be made.
For me, curating "Family Trees" at Galeri Baraz in 2022, when I look back on it today, meant witnessing not simply one period of his artistic life, but this entire intellectual continuity.
As we brought together works from different years within the Soyağaçları series, we were also seeing how the same fundamental question continued to take different forms across decades: What happens when different things are brought together? How does an espas emerge within a surface? How much should an artwork be controlled and how much should it be allowed to form on its own?
Writing about him today, that exhibition no longer feels to me like simply an exhibition from the past. It has taken on another meaning as an experience that allowed me to understand more closely Özdemir Altan’s place within the history of Turkish art.
Because when we look at his artistic life, what we see is not so much a single artist as an artist who was constantly reconstructing himself.
From "Romantic Period" to "Kings and Queens," from "Cyclops and the Son of the Fly King" to "Collages and Three-Dimensional Works," from "Random Confluence" to "Family Trees," the journey was ultimately the continuation of the same curiosity in different forms.
A curiosity about what art could be.
I think this is perhaps the most important thing Altan leaves behind. A strong belief that art does not have a fixed definition, that an artist does not have to remain forever within the language they have created, and that sometimes the best way to discover something new is simply to keep working without knowing exactly what you are looking for.
At the end of a long artistic life, one might expect an artist to repeat himself. Özdemir Altan did the opposite. He questioned even the language he had created, started again from somewhere else, developed new methods and kept the boundaries of art open for himself.
This is why simply saying that we have lost an important painter does not feel sufficient.
We have lost an artist who spent more than seven decades asking persistent questions about how art could be understood and made in Türkiye.
But his questions remain.
What can art be? Where does a painting begin? Where does the space emerge? When do differences become a whole? When does chance become art itself?
Özdemir Altan spent his life not answering these questions once and for all, but asking them again and again.
Perhaps that is why, when looking back at his life and work, it feels more appropriate to speak not of an ending, but of a conversation that continues. Because there was never much of a rush in Altan’s art or in his life to arrive at a definitive conclusion. There was always another work, another idea, another possibility ahead.
This world once had an Özdemir Altan. To have lived in the same time as him, to have looked at his work, discussed his ideas and, for a moment, had the privilege of accompanying his art was a great fortune. We were lucky to have him.
