If there is a common thread in Fusun Onur’s art, it is an interest in the nature and boundaries of representation
, a type of waterfront building unique to Istanbul, which sits on the banks of the Bosporus. For Ms Onur, who still shares this family heirloom with her sister, the house has always been a studio. The things it contains in abundance—objects, light, shadows, sounds—are the stuff of her art. She sometimes discards artworks she doesn’t like by tossing them into the water.
Ms Onur graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul in 1960, where she had studied sculpture under Ali Hadi Bara, one of modern Turkey’s pre-eminent sculptors. She won a Fulbright scholarship and did a masters degree at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she developed an interest in philosophy and art theory. It was in America that she first experimented with modernist abstraction, leaving behind the figurative busts of her student days.
When Ms Onur began exhibiting her work in Istanbul in the 1970s, the city’s art scene had not seen anything quite like it. She only used black ink for a series of 12 drawings, “Dividing Space on a White Piece of Paper” , but created the impression of depth and volume.
“From traditional academic training, Ms Onur developed an unusual visual language and practice for its time,” says Bige Orer, the director of the Istanbul Biennial, a contemporary-art exhibition. “She questioned the passive experience of looking at sculpture and its distance from the observer.” For Ms Orer, these works anticipated installation art, which would only later become a popular art form.
Her enigmatic art quickly drew attention both at home and abroad. She participated in the first Biennale Internationale des Jeunes Artistes in Paris in 1971, and her work was regularly exhibited in Turkey in the 1980s and 1990s, including at the inaugural Istanbul Biennale in 1987. Her art from this period turns inwards, focusing on childhood, domestic life and memory. A sculpture called “
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