Untitled engraving

Following his graduation from the Department of Painting at the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts (IDGSA) in 1960, Altan Gürman studied painting and screen-printing at the School of Fine Arts in Paris during the years 1963–1966. Gürman served as a member of the founding committee of the Basic Design Education Division at IDGSA and became its chair in 1974. Adopting a critical view of the limited debate of his time on figurative and abstract painting, he explored the possibilities offered by conceptual art and the use of ready-made objects, which earned him a prominent role in the contemporary art scene of Turkey. His body of work consists of prints on canvas, collages, works produced with the decoupage and montage techniques. The most distinguishable of them are his paintings on canvas in which he replaced the paint with ready-made objects, wire, wood, red and white hazard barrier tape, nails, plastic, and cardboard. Questions about militarism hold a prominent place in the thematic repertoire of his works that focus on the historical and social problems of his period. Gürman’s engravings include prints that employ the camouflage pattern to varying degrees, metal plate forms borrowed from military machines and vehicles, as well as militarised depictions of nature. Many of the works the artist produced from 1965 to his untimely death in 1976 and his archive were added to Arter’s collection in 2013.