Turgut Atalay

Who is Turgut Atalay? (1918 Konya – 2004 Istanbul)

He was born in Konya in 1918. He attended primary and secondary school in public schools and then Istanbul Boys’ High School. When he was 17, he entered the State Conservatory and studied with Adnan Saygun. Between 1936 and 1945, he studied at the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts, first in the workshops of Nazmi Ziya Gülan, then in the workshops of İbrahim Çallı and Léopold Lévy.
He worked with the German sculptor Rudolf Belling for two years. In 1940, he joined the New Group movement founded under the leadership of student Léopold Lévy. He participated in various activities of this group, which proposed painting with “socialist-realist” concerns, which emerged as a movement against the D Group, especially the Harbor Exhibition on 19 May 1941. He married Mualla Hanım in 1947. He worked as an art teacher for 4 years.
A painting he painted in Edirne in 1946 was accepted to the international exhibition sponsored by UNESCO in Paris. Atalay participated in various exhibitions with his oil paintings. He started working in the genre of theater decorations and was recruited to Istanbul City Theaters by Muhsin Ertuğrul. In 1946, he designed the stage for Cevat Fehmi Başkut’s play “Baykuş”. He worked as a guest designer at Kenterler Theater for 4 years. In 1955, one of his reliefs won the Etibank award.

He showed his true creative power in this field by decorating a total of 300 classical and modern plays, 12 operas and 27 operettas with a contemporary approach. He passed away in Istanbul in 2004. He has works in the Istanbul Painting and Sculpture Museum, other museums and galleries, and private collections. It has a mixed style that includes demonstrative and decorative effects in a figure-oriented line.