CANDEĞER FURTUN, winner of the 2023 Aydın Doğan Honorary Award, one the most prestigious awards in Turkey, uses traditional ceramic techniques to create almost surreally beautiful figurative art. In this, her first gallery show in quarter of a century, she juxtaposes her work with the London-based British ceramicist and researcher CHRISTIE BROWN’s strange realm of animal figures and hybrid beings.
A pupil of Nurullah Berk’s studio at the Painting Department of the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts in the mid-50s, Candeğer Furtun joined İsmail Hakkı Oynar’s ceramics studio at the same university graduating in 1959. After a year at the Chemistry Department of Istanbul University learning about clay and minerals, and working in the Eczacıbaşı Ceramic Factory Art Workshop, she won a Fullbright scholarship to the Rochester Institute of Technology School for American Craftsmen. After graduating with her master’s degree, she lectured there for a period, and held her first solo exhibition, at the Craft Center, Massachusetts. She moved back to Turkey in 1964. Focusing on functional forms in the early years, her interest first turned to vessels that emphasised the features of plastic, then to organic and natural figures. In 1969, she held her first solo exhibition in Turkey at the Taksim Municipality Art Gallery. In the 1970s, she became recognised for the vibrancy and innovation she brought to the art of ceramics in Turkey. The organic figures she had experimented with earlier took the form of reliefs dominated by circular and fine lines in the 1980s. It was the 1990s Furtun reached her free-form approach when she produced her series of arms, legs and hands. In a major tribute to her career, in 2021–22 Selen Ansen curated a comprehensive retrospective on two separate floors of Arter. Later in 2022 her work featuring in the exhibition Another Round, a parallel event of the 17th Istanbul Biennial organized by Galeri Nev.
Christie Brown’s ceramic and mixed media figurative sculpture explores connections between historic artefacts, archaeology and psychoanalysis, as well as the mythology, narrative and symbolism associated with clay. Her work as been described as ‘teetering on the foggy intersection between art and craft. Very clearly sculptural but informed by a deep history of clay.’ She is a member of the Royal Society of Sculptors. See christiebrown.co.uk.
Issue 66, December 2023
Turkey’s Centenary Issue
