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GÜLTEKİN ÇİZGEN
Biography: Gültekin Çizgen
Born in Istanbul in 1940, Gültekin Çizgen, a well-known, influential, contemporary artist, who, for 63 years as an art professional produced audiovisual photographs, illustrations, and glass artworks. He taught dozens of students art photography and its professional application, many of whom later became prominent names in their own right in these fields. He deeply influenced his own period, as well as later generations, with his “local” stance and activities in the world of art.
His international photography career is reflected his artistic personality and energy, across 14 countries. He had solo photographic exhibitions not only in Turkey but also overseas, including in Germany, the United States, France, Switzerland, Italy, the People’s Republic of China, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Korea, India, Hong Kong, Mongolia and Russia.
In addition, the hundreds of multivision programs he produced and directed have been screened in 24 countries, from the US to Kazakhstan.
Çizgen is the editor and copyright author of 102 publications, including photo albums, essays, technical travel books and memoirs, as well as albums of pictures and glass artwork.
In addition to giving many seminars in Turkey, he also gave seminars on art and photography in Toronto/Canada, the People’s Republic of China (Beijing University of Fine Arts and Design), and the Netherlands (Breda University). His work has been exhibited in many museums and collections.
In addition to countless photographic journeys within Turkey, he also travelled to 87 countries across five continents. He wrote about his impressions of these trips in two books: Afrika Günlüğü (African Diary) and Dünyadan Sevgilerle – 25 ülke, 25 yorum (With Love from the World – 25 Countries, 25 Comments).
Çizgen is the founder of Yeni Fotoğraf Dergisi (New Photography Journal), is an honorary founding member of the Photography Institute of Mimar Sinan University, and the founding chairman of the Association of Professional Publicity Photographers (Profesyonel Tanıtım Fotoğrafçıları Derneği).
As a photography curator, he organized 17 photographic exhibitions at the Fototrek Photography Center, for the Istanbul European Capital of Culture in 2010.
Furthermore, in addition to the Fototrek Photography Center and Istanbul Caddebostan Cultural Center hosting photographic exhibitions for Çizgen’s 50th year in art with support from the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, an evening was also organized at the Tarık Zafer Tunaya Cultural Center in tribute to Çizgen. As part of these events, the exhibition, Have a Good Day Istanbul, was opened at the Istanbul Taksim Subway, a crowded transit point used by 55,000 people everyday, which lasted for months.
By 2021, Çizgen had founded or contributed to the following art institutions: The İFE İstanbul Photography House / the Florance Nightingale Museum, the 1st Headquarters – Selimiye / the Eskişehir Artistic Glass Museum.
By bringing Fatih Municipality and the Association of Friends of Photography (Fotoğraf Dostları Derneği) together, he also founded the Istanbul Photography Museum, participating at all stages of the museum’s foundation from the initial project stage, to its implementation. He served as the founding curator and Chairman of the Executive Board of the Association of Friends of Photography. Çizgen was the organizer and art director of Fotoistanbul, the 1st Beşiktaş International Festival of Photography, which was visited by three million people in October 2014.
During his career, spanning from 1950s to 2020s, Çizgen shed light on the search for rich expression in many areas, from photography to illustration, from glass art to contemporary meşk and tapestry.
Owner of the Republic Period – Photographic Collection of 2500 pieces, Gültekin Çizgen’s photographic language, which evolved over the past half century, uses a dynamic, with the development of a blurred style, one that is constantly alive and pulsating, and which still guides the art community today, as it did from the beginning.
He is one of the leading profiles in Turkish photography, thanks to the knowledge he has accumulated and the efforts he has made in a timespan covering more than half a century, as well as the photographs he has produced, the institutions he has founded, and his theoretical publications.
He continues to work intensively, constantly in pursuit of new artistic projects.
Some people have tremendous energy, to search more, to learn and produce more, but where this energy comes from no one knows. The flame of their desires keeps them alive and never consumes them. Gültekin Çizgen is an unstoppable multilingual worker of visual art, and an inventor. For more than 60 years, he has been maintaining a life experience interwoven with curiosity and excitement. He builds, dismantles, adds, folds, unravels, and goes back to the beginning and makes again with the new approaches and the new materials that he pushes to their limits. Rather than sitting at the crossroad of his neighborhood and conveying the visual inventory of locality, without hesitating to embrace innovations in application techniques, he chooses to keep the local alive by updating it by taking the worldly approaches with him.
Vasıf KORTUN
Those who have feasted their eyes on all of Gültekin Çizgen’s portfolios may feel that he is in constant search mode, somewhere between his realistic/direct photography and his conceptual photography. This line, this phenomenon, is a valuable position in terms of the artistic approach to photography.