ARTISTS

Abidin Elderoğlu, graduated from the Istanbul School of Education in 1926. The artist, who began painting at an early age, won a state scholarship in 1930 with which he traveled to Paris. There, in addition to the courses he followed at the Beaux-Arts, he studied with Paul Albert Laurens at the Julian Academy, and with André Lhote at the Académie Lhote. On his return to Turkey in 1932, he was appointed art teacher to the Izmir School of Education and opened his first solo exhibition that same year in Denizli. In the thirty years that followed, Elderoğlu continued teaching and painting contemporaneously. His solo exhibitions were opened in Madrid, Brussels, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Venice and Milan. He was deemed worthy of the “Honorary Prize” at the Sao Paulo Biennial in 1963, the “Shah of Iran Grand Prize” at the Teheran Biennial in 1966, attended also by Ferruh Başağa, and the “National Prize” at the Cagnes-sur-Mer Biennial in France in 1972.

In addition, Elderoğlu penned articles on the theoretic and idealistic concepts of Turkish painting, like many other artists of the Republican Era, among them Ercümend Kalmık, who is also represented by Gallery Nev. Elderoğlu’s manifesto, entitled “My Art”, published a year before his demise in 1974, had a considerable impact on both his contemporaries and his students.