Dr. Ahu Antmen is a professor of modern and contemporary art at Sabancı University Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences in Istanbul. Her research is based on issues of modernity, identity and gender in modern and contemporary Turkish art. Her publications include 20. Yüzyıl Batı Sanatında Akımlar [Trends in 20th Century Western Art]; Kimlikli Bedenler: Sanat, Kimlik, Cinsiyet [Bodies with Identities: Art, Identity, Gender]; Memory of Time: The Life and Art of Ali Teoman Germaner; İçerdeki Yabancı: Hale Tenger [Stranger Within: Hale Tenger]; and the edited volume Sanat/Cinsiyet: Sanat Tarihi ve Feminist Eleştiri [Art/Gender: Art History and Feminist Critique]. She has contributed to various international publications, including Mapping Impressionist Painting in a Global Context; Globalising Impressionism: Reception, Translation, and Transnationalism; Curatorial Challenges: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Contemporary Curating; Unleashed: Contemporary Art from Turkey; and Beyond Imagined Uniqueness: Nationalisms in Contemporary Perspective. Her curatorial work includes Nur Koçak: Our Blissful Souveniers at Salt (2019); Bare, Naked, Nude: A Story of Modernity in Turkish Painting at the Pera Museum (2015); Second Eye: Women Photographers from Turkey at Sismanoglio Megaro (2013), and Turkish Painting from the Tanzimat Era to the Republic (2012) at the Sabancı Museum, Istanbul.
Abstract
This paper focuses on the Turkish artist Gencay Kasapçı (1933-2017) whose formative years were spent in Italy during the years 1959-1966. In these years, she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence on an Italian state scholarship, then moved to Rome and became an active member of a transnational group of avantgarde artists. During her years in Italy, she participated in various exhibitions and received prizes at the International Premio Gubbio painting and drawing competitions, and worked as an illustrator for Mondadori and Vallecchi publications. Her work was shown in Venice at the Il Cavallino Gallery, in Milan at the Cadario Gallery, and in Rome, at the “Zero Avantgarde” exhibition in 1966 at Il Segno Gallery alongside Abe Nobuya, her teacher, and Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana, Günter Uecker, Piero Manzoni, Otto Piene and others.
The primary aim of this paper is to trace Gencay Kasapçı’s presence within a transnational network of artists that was active in Rome in the 1960s, and how her travel to Italy after her education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul transformed her practice. This experience changed her understanding of art and her practice immensely, but so did her return to Turkey; hence Gencay’s work of different periods reveals how local and/or transnational environments can effect artistic production. In this framework, how a young Turkish woman artist in the 1960s played a role within European avantgarde circles, and how the artistic milieu of the Italian avantgarde reflected upon her work are obvious questions to consider, as well as her contribution to the abstract art of the era as a woman artist. Gencay’s work is also interesting because it encapsulates not only issues of gender but of culture: Coming from a place where abstraction and abstract symbolism carry historical weight, her work opens questions in relation to Western/non-Western interpretations of languages of abstraction, as well as issues regarding the use of alternative materials for painting, such as beads for example, and the deliberate confrontation of hierarchical divisions of art and craft.
Image: Gencay Kasapcı’s photograph on the back of her exhibition brochure at the Gallerie del Cavallino, Venice, 1962. Courtesy of Gencay Kasapçı Archive.
