Famous Turkish Painter Tomur Atagök Passed Away...
The founder of academic museum education in Turkey, painter and academic Tomur Atagök, has passed away.
A pioneer in the art scene in many areas, Tomur Atagök continued his higher education in the United States after graduating from Robert College. After receiving his degrees from Oklahoma State University (BFA), College of Arts and Crafts, and University of California, Berkeley (MA), he returned to Turkey.
Atagök, who began his professional career as the Assistant Director of the Painting and Sculpture Museum at Mimar Sinan University, later served as a faculty member at Yıldız Technical University. He assumed the position of Head of Culture, Press and Foreign Relations at the university, and also founded and directed the Museum Studies Master's Program. He served as the Dean of YTU's Faculty of Art and Design between 2004-2006.
Atagök, who carried out numerous research and projects in the fields of art and museum studies, also wrote articles on these subjects. He organized various solo exhibitions throughout his artistic career. In addition to the 40 solo exhibitions he opened in the USA, Netherlands, Balkans and Turkey, he participated in numerous group exhibitions at home and abroad and received awards.
Tomur Atagök's Understanding of Art
In his understanding of art, Atagök initially addressed artistic space as a problem of relationships between forms, and later focused on the changing and living triple relationship between the artist-work of art-viewer. According to the artist, a work of art re-exists as it is perceived by each viewer and reaches a different artistic result with each viewer.
Working with metallic surfaces, Atagök creates spiritual and objective realities that the viewer can interact with with his own image and interpretation by using pictorial reality and space, images, symbols and descriptions perceived from the environment. According to his philosophy of art, the work, which undergoes physical change with the participation of the viewer's images reflected on the surface, goes beyond painting by providing the integrity of life and art.
“It is not easy to tell about myself”
Tomur Atagök, who took part in İşSanat’s video series titled Gün Işığında in 2021, presented a sincere narrative about her artistic life, intellectual background and production process. She began by saying “It is not easy to tell about myself” and conveyed how the connection she established with art was intertwined with her life, her female identity and space in her own voice. She stated that she wanted to ensure that the viewer encountered her own reflection in the works she made on metal surfaces. According to her, this was a way of establishing a mutual and living relationship between art and the viewer: “I wanted the viewer to see not only the painting, but also themselves,” she said.
Atagök said that the figures she used in her paintings were not idealized; they were women who had lived, resisted and wanted to tell, and expressed that she saw art not only as an individual form of expression but also as a part of social memory. Danatçı also argued that making women visible meant rewriting history through art.
Tomur Atagök’s Works
Tomur Atagök, whose work has been marked by the theme of women since the 1970s, questions women’s identity, existence and relationships through different forms of expression. He also frequently uses mythological female characters and goddesses in his works.
In his book, Bildiğirim Gördüklerimdir, Gördüklerim Bildiğirimdir, which was first published in YKY in 2011, Atagök collects his writings from the early 1980s to the mid-2000s in three sections under the titles On Women Artists, On Exhibitions and On Artists.
In addition to written and visual documents on Atagök’s productions from the 1970s to the present, his archive, which includes his long-term studies on Turkish museum history and women artists, was made available by SALT Research in December 2018.
Some of the artist’s solo exhibitions in the archive are as follows:
“Tomur Atagök Painting Exhibition” Vakko Art Gallery, Ankara, 1984
“Tomur Atagök Exhibition” Mine Art Gallery, Istanbul, 1993
“Tomur Atagök’s “Neverending Story: Human” Brieflyart, Istanbul, 2022
Tomur Atagök “Journals”, Elgiz Museum, Istanbul
Tomur Atagök “Circular Traces” retrospective exhibition Kibele Art Gallery, Istanbul, 2020
source:https://artdogistanbul.com/tomur-atagoku-kaybettik/