He is one of the most distinguished representatives of 20th-century Turkish painting and perhaps the most widely known Turkish painter in international art circles.
Tall in stature, elegant, slender build, long, smooth white hair surrounding his slightly dark-skinned, slender beautiful face, and intelligent eyes shining brightly behind his thin-framed glasses: This physical structure embodied the personality of a sensitive, hard-working, outspoken artist.
Turkish painter and architect Erol Akyavaş was born in Istanbul in 1932. He graduated from Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts, Department of Architecture. He attended Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu Workshop as a guest student between 1948 and 1952. He then went to Paris. He continued his studies in the workshops of Fernand Léger and André Lhote and joined the "Cercle et Carré" Group in Paris. He went to the USA in 1954.
In addition to his painting studies, he continued his architectural education under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He worked on architectural projects with Architect Euro Saarinen between 1960 and 1962. He settled in New York in 1967. After the 1950s, he held personal exhibitions in cities such as New York, Cleveland, Rome, Milan, Bremen, Stuttgart, London, Berlin and Paris.
In 1960, one of his works was added to the Museum of Modern Art collections. His paintings were exhibited in the museums of Bremen and Stuttgart. He passed away in America in 1999.
In addition to his paintings, he has works created using different tools and equipment and original prints. At the beginning of his artistic life, he was prone to surrealism and created an original series of works that featured architectural spaces and emphasized the concept of depth. However, he later turned to conceptual studies. The 1980s were a very special period.
He establishes subjective connections with pictorial expressions, wars, and victories, which he progresses with patience and interiority, by thinking about the concepts of interior and exterior, existence and body, time and space, and reaching new philosophical views. At this stage, he evaluated the inspirations he received from traditional calligraphy and miniature art in the works he created in line with his unique understanding of composition.
It is possible to see the effects of architectural education in the early works of Erol Akyavaş, who has collages, prints, lithographs, and installations in addition to his paintings: Paintings in which architectural spaces are depicted and the concept of depth comes to the fore...
Erol Akyavaş, who turned to more conceptual works in his later periods, became especially interested in traditional calligraphy and miniatures and began to include various quotes from these fields in his compositions. Traces of Erol Akyavaş's interest in Sufi philosophy can be seen in his later series.