Fahrelnissa Zeid A Selection from the Istanbul Modern Collection

Istanbul Modern presented a selection of works by Fahrelnissa Zeid, a pioneer of modern art and one of the first exponents of abstract art in Turkey. Drawn from the museum’s extensive collection of her oeuvre, the selection focuses on her most prolific years between the 1940-1970s.

Fahrelnissa Zeid was born on Büyükada in 1901 as the niece of Grand Vizier Cevat Pasha. Her siblings were author Cevat Şakir Kabaağaçlı and painter Aliye Berger and her niece was the ceramic artist Füreya Koral. Her children from her marriage with author İzzet Melih Devrim were the painter Nejad Melih Devrim and the theater actress Şirin Devrim. One of the first female graduates of the Sanayi-i Nefise (Academy of Fine Arts), Zeid continued her studies in painting in the studio of Stalbach at the Académie Ranson in Paris, and later in the studio of Namık İsmail in Istanbul. In 1934, she married Prince Zeid, the ambassador of Iraq in Ankara, and became a princess. In 1942, she joined the Group D and took part in their exhibitions before her first solo exhibition in 1944 in her home in Maçka. Zeid had her works exhibited in Paris, London, New York, Brussels, and other cities after World War II. In 1976, Fahrelnissa Zeid moved to Amman, where she established an institute of arts bearing her name and died in 1991.

Known for her exuberant, powerful compositions, Zeid’s unique visual language is so vivid and rich that it cannot be reduced to a single style. She creates figurative compositions with spaces constructed according to the style of miniatures at the beginning of her art life; and in her maturity period she become prominent with geometrical and freely abstractionist works reminiscent of stained glass surfaces. Her late period consists mainly of portraits in which psychological narrative comes to the fore.

Istanbul Modern lent eight works to Zeid’s retrospective which had opened at the Tate Modern in London and moved on to the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle in Berlin and the Sursock Museum in Beirut. Meanwhile, the selection exhibited in Istanbul Modern featured the abstract geometric compositions in which Zeid excelled as well as her expressionist paintings, which combine references to Byzantine, Islamic, and Western art with her unique color palette.

Curators: Levent Çalıkoğlu, Deniz Pehlivaner