BEDRi RAHMi EYÜBOĞLU

Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu (b. 1911, Görele; d. 1975, Istanbul) commenced his professional artistic journey by enrolling in the Academy of Fine Arts in 1929, where he studied at the studios of Nazmi Ziya Güran and İbrahim Çallı. In 1931, he travelled to Dijon and Lyon in France with the scholarship of his brother Sabahattin Eyüboğlu. During this period, he meticulously copied the works of renowned painters such as Paul Gauguin and El Greco at museums. In 1932, Eyüboğlu worked at André Lhote’s studio in Paris, where he encountered the artist Ernestine Letoni, who later became his life partner and adopted the name Eren. Joining an Istanbul-based artist collective Group d’s fourth exhibition in 1934, he remained a part of the group until its final exhibitions. Concurrently, his poems were published in literary magazines and he began writing articles for newspapers and magazines in 1935. The same year saw the organisation of his first solo exhibition in Romania, thanks to the initiative of Eren Eyüboğlu. In 1937, Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu became the assistant to Léopold Lévy at the Academy of Fine Arts. His travels within Turkey included assignments in Edirne (1938), Çorum (1942), and İskilip. During these periods, he produced paintings with Anatolian-specific themes before transitioning to mural paintings. Between 1942 and 1975, he served as a studio professor at the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts. In 1941, he published his first poetry book, Yaradan’a Mektuplar (Letters to the Creator). In 1943, he created his first mural paintings for the Ortaköy Lido Swimming Pool, Istanbul. As his artistic evolution unfolded, Eyüboğlu fused traditional Turkish motifs with modernist approaches in the 1950s. In the 1958 Brussels World Exhibition, he created a 227-square-meter mosaic panel, and in 1959, he prepared a 60-square-meter mosaic panel for the NATO headquarters in Paris. In addition to awards at the State Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions, he won the Grand Prize at the 1958 Brussels World Exhibition and the Gold Medal at the São Paulo Biennial. In the 1960s, Eyüboğlu was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship, which enabled him and Eren Eyüboğlu to spend two years in the United States, where he continued his artistic practice. During this period, he adopted a more abstract and experimental approach, focusing on the expressive potential of colour and texture through material experimentation. In 1961, he began teaching at California Berkeley University as a visiting professor. During this period, he turned to abstract forms with rich colours. Adding another dimension to his art, he experimented to find unseen and unknown colours and used sand, glue, sawdust and crumpled Japanese paper. His paintings are in many museums and collections, including but not limited to the Guggenheim Museum, Abu Dhabi; MOMA (Museum of Modern Art), New York; Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture, Istanbul; Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, Istanbul and the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations, Ankara.