Untitled (July)

One of the pioneers of contemporary art in Turkey, Füsun Onur’s artistic practice spans more than half a century, from the 1960s to the present. Onur graduated from the Department of Sculpture at Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts in 1957 and continued her art education in the US. Her works focus on form, space, time, and the relations between these concepts. As the diversity of materials multiplied in the artist’s production, her work expanded to include everyday, narrative, and even autobiographical elements. In the 1980s, Onur used ordinary, everyday materials to explore the relationship between painting and frame and between sculpture and painting, developing a highly idiosyncratic language that eradicates the borders between these categories.
In the “Untitled” painting from 1983, the canvas gains form and texture by being folded and knotted; it is pulled to the side of the frame like a curtain to reveal a white, empty landscape. In the other piece, titled “July”, Onur opens a triangular window on the surface of the canvas and then covers it with a cage of woven threads. A sewing needle with a red thread appears in the work, as though she started to stitch the cage, yet left the motif unfinished and put the needle to rest. Although the floral motifs drawn in pencil on the canvas appear to be mere sketches, the artist's name and the date on the margins indicate that the painting is actually completely finished. These floral motifs, left unpainted, reappear in a colourful crochet that ties back the hair of a woman whose face is buried in the canvas, as if looking at the back side of the painting.