Yüksel Arslan’s works in the Permanent Collection of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi

Yüksel Arslan’s Arture 188, 1978, Arture 538, Schopenhauer, 2000, Arture 536, Walseries, 2000, Arture 539, 2000 and Arture 548, Pessoa, 2001 were acquired by the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.

Located in the heart of the Saadiyat Cultural District, the future Guggenheim Abu Dhabi museum is a collaboration between the Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. 

Arslan's idiosyncratic colors are generated by a special technique that is brought out particularly in Arslan’s works on paper of various sizes, the so-called artures. Yüksel Arslan combined the word art with the French suffix ure (as in peinture or écriture) to create the word “arture” and he regards his artures as a consciously anti painterly attitude, for in his opinion painting has, since the advent of modernism, degenerated into a medium whose origins have been neglected by more and more artists. 

According to the artist, he is not a painter, but a tuis, borrowing the term from Brecht who invented it to designate intellectuals. He painted the human and everything created by him/her, with an almost encyclopedic conception, “working as a painter, a thinker, and a poet-designer.”

Yüksel Arslan (1933, İstanbul – 2017, Paris) studied Art History at Istanbul University, then started to paint. In 1961, he moved to Paris upon the invitation of art dealer Raymond Cordier, where he created the Homunculus-cucus-palus, and the Planus-phallus-micrococcus series. In 1968, he settled in Paris for the second time; during this period, he focused on artures based on his readings on Marx, Engels, Nietzsche, and Freud. In 1975, he completed his Capital (1967) series. This was the first of his series to be compiled in a book; followed in the 1980s by Influences, Auto-Artures, and Human. Apart from Paris, his works were exhibited in various French cities such as Sarcelles, Rennes, and Nice, as well as Kunsthalle Wien, Kunsthalle Zürich, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Drawing Center New York, and Venice Biennale, to name few. In 2009,  Yüksel Arslan Retrospective was held at Santralistanbul Energy Museum. Human was published in three volumes in 1990, 1995, and 1999.