Biography

Nejad Devrim is one of the prominent Turkish artists who spent a significant period of his career in Paris. He is a painter who flourished in the libertarian atmosphere of Paris where artistic practice was fuelled by an atmosphere open to criticism. His aim was different than the previous generation of Turkish intellectuals who came to Paris for a Western education only to replicate it in Turkey. Devrim was part of a generation who constituted the first modernists of Turkey. His works were contemporaneous to modernist artists of his period and looked to actively participate in the European art scene. He abandoned the figurative compositions that he commenced in Istanbul and produced works that would later be identified as the masterpieces of Turkish abstract art. He established a genuine place in the European art scene by carrying the multi-colored compositions of Byzantine mosaics to his works. Devrim is recognized as the most important representer of geometrical and lyrical abstraction in Turkish history of art. As a Lyrical Abstract artist, Nejad Devrim believed that nature should not be imitated, but rather its meaning explored. He depicted what he found in lyrically expressive paintings in which color is used as a powerful compositional element. He regarded his paintings as places in which chance encounters and unknowns might be discovered. 

Nejad Devrim (1923, Istanbul – 1995, Poland) was the son of artist Fahrelnissa Zeid and author İzzet Melih Devrim. As a member of a family whose members were mostly artists, Devrim left for Paris in 1946, completing his studies at the Istanbul Faculty of Fine Art in 1941 after five years. In Paris where he lived until 1968, he exhibited with established artists of the day and appeared among the Paris intelligentsia together with the most prominent names of abstract art of that period. In 1968, he left Paris and went to Poland where he lived until his passing in 1995. Devrim is acknowledged as the first artist who has integrated the abstract into Turkish painting. Devrim’s solo shows include Galerie Allard (Paris, 1947), Galerie Ex Libris (Brussels, 1953), Alexander Zodiac Iolas (New York, 1957), K. Kunsthandel Gallery (Kopenhag, 1964), Galerie Isabella Lemarie  Dubreuil (Paris, 1975), Vakko Art Gallery (Ankara, 1982), Galeri Nev İstanbul (2001 - Retrospective, 2018 - Constructing the Abstract). His works are included in the collections of Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture; İstanbul Modern; Musée National d’Art Modern, Paris; Musée d’Art Modern de la Ville de Paris; Nantes Musée des Beaux-Arts; National Museum of Warsaw; Musée Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels as well as in other private collections.