Pavilion of Turkey to host Füsun Onur in Venice

An installation by the influential artist Füsun Onur will be presented at the Pavilion of Turkey at the 59th International Art Exhibition, la Biennale di Venezia, to be held between May and November 2021.

The Pavilion of Turkey is located in its long-term venue at the Arsenale, secured by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV) for the duration of 20 years from 2014 to 2034.

As one of Turkey's pioneering contemporary artists, Füsun Onur's works deal with potentials of space, time, rhythm and form that are inherent in simple, everyday materials charged with narrative and oblique autobiographical references.

In her prolific career that spans over half a century, Onur defied boundaries between painting and sculpture, becoming a pivotal figure to introduce avant-garde into the artistic canon in Turkey in the early 1970's.

She participated in solo and group exhibitions at the Augarten Contemporary, Vienna (2010), Istanbul Modern (2011), Maçka Art Gallery, Istanbul (2012), and ARTER, Istanbul (2014). Her works were featured at the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2001), ZKM, Karlsruhe (2004) and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2005) as well as in the Istanbul Biennials (1987, 1995, 2011, 2015), the Moscow Biennale (2007), dOCUMENTA(2012) and Kassel (2012).

A graduate of Üsküdar American Academy for Girls, Onur studied Sculpture in the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul, became a student at Hadi Bara Atelier, and moved on to her post-graduate studies in Sculpture at the Maryland College of Art with a Fulbright scholarship in 1960. She lives and works in Istanbul.

"Füsun Onur is one of the rare artists to form a poetic relationship between life and art beyond just artworks, but as a way of being. She explores the fundamental...

Continue reading on: