Kuzgun Acar, 1928-1976

After graduating from Sultanahmet Commercial High School, Kuzgun Acar enrolled in the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts as a sculpture student in 1948, starting out in the studio of Rudolf Belling. He later transferred to the studios of Ali Hadi Bara and Zühtü Müridoğlu and graduated in 1953, holding his first solo exhibition that same year at Maya Art Gallery. He was awarded first prize at the Second International Biennial of Young Artists in Paris in 1961, which earned him a solo show at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1962.

We see a tendency toward the figurative in Acar’s early works; at that time he strived to break free from the boundaries of classical sculpture and was on a quest for new materials. It was only in the late 1950s that his search yielded results: wire mesh. He visited scrap dealers along the Golden Horn and tried out different methods and various kinds of wire mesh that he found there. He would cut, bend, and roll it up into volumes. In later years, he set his sights on nails, a readymade material. The artist was interested in movement and dynamism beyond the idea of sculpture as the shaping of volume. The welding technique he used in the nail-based sculptures later led him to create wall sculptures and projects for public spaces.

Acar belonged to a generation who believed that art should permeate life. As a sculptor, he was more of a builder than a carver. His method for crystallizing his thoughts was to solder pieces together, uniting them into a whole and thus creating a sense of flow and movement based on cause and effect, and therefore gifting empty space with a new mass. Working with readymade materials and transforming their disorder into solid structures by intervening in their deficiencies or excesses, the artist discovered a world that he could explore through his intelligence and intuition. Acar used technology only in its more rudimentary forms, such as welding. In his works, metal is simply metal; its very existence is its reason for being, and just like its producer, it never compromises its character. We see from notes the artist made in his sketchbooks that he considered metal a superior material for two reasons: because of its cultural ties to humans, who have been working it since the Iron Age, and because despite this bond, the various raw forms of this material, as in the example of nails, have the capacity to disturb and startle.